Cuando Kafka hacía furor: Memorias del Greenwich Village

by Anatole Broyard, Catalina Martínez Muñoz (Translator)

«El Village, en 1946, era lo más parecido a París en los años veinte. Los alquileres eran baratos, los restaurantes eran baratos, y yo creía que incluso la felicidad podía adquirirse a un bajo precio.»

Quien habla es Anatole Broyard, joven recién emancipado, aspirante a escritor, amante del jazz, al que vemos instalarse en el pequeño barrio de Greenwich Village, abrir su librería en la calle Cornelia a la vez que ejercitaba su libido con Sheri [Sheri Martinelli], la protegida de Anaïs Nin, asistir a clases en la New School, donde Erich Fromm, Karen Horney y Meyer Shapiro debatían sobre «las nuevas tendencias del arte, el sexo y la psicosis»; y en el camino encontrarse en cafés y clubes de baile con escritores malditos como Delmore Schwartz, célebres como Dylan Thomas y otros novelistas y poetas en ciernes.

Estas amenas memorias de estilo epigramático, escritas con perspicacia, elegancia y un humor ácido, nos trasladan a una época en la que Kafka era tan popular que «la gente estaba dispuesta a pagar por sus libros lo que fuese», y en la que «de no haber sido por los libros, habríamos quedado completamente a merced del sexo». Broyard rinde así homenaje a una bohemia olvidada a través de las vivencias de un joven ávido por encontrar no sólo su voz, sino también su propio espacio en un paisaje y un tiempo irrepetibles.

Completa el libro el conocido ensayo de Broyard «Retrato de un hipster», publicado en 1948 en la revista The New Partisan. Precisamente, según cuenta el biógrafo James Campbell, ese mismo año y en el mismo lugar, el Village de Nueva York, dos jóvenes poetas, John Clellon Holmes y Jack Kerouak, bautizaban la Generación Beat. En el artículo, Broyard escribe una especie de necrológica del hipster y, como motivo recurrente en sus libros, mide el abismo que hay entre la máscara y el rostro que enmascara:

«Pertrechado con su lenguaje y su nueva filosofía como armas ocultas, el hipster se lanzó a la conquista del mundo. Se colocó en la esquina y empezó a dirigir el tráfico de los viandantes. Su postura era inconfundible. Su rostro —«el corte transversal de un movimiento»— parecía congelado en la «fisionomía de la perspicacia»: los ojos entornados con aire astuto, la boca relajada hasta el extremo de una sensibilidad clara, transparente, vigilaba su entorno como un propietario suspicaz. Siempre estaba algo apartado del grupo. Con los pies bien plantados, los hombros hacia atrás, los codos recogidos, las manos pegadas a los costados, como un poste implacable en torno al cual circulaba el mundo de una manera servil.»

«Si alguna vez ha sido usted joven, si ha vivido o ha querido vivir en Greenwich Village, si ha sentido pasión por los libros o por el sexo o por las dos cosas, seguro que saboreará estas memorias.» Detroit Free Press

«Greenwich Village fue el lago Walden de Broyard. Y, como Walden, este libro se convertirá en un clásico.» Arthur Danto

«Todo el ingenio, la compasión y la perspicacia de Broyard… Su inteligencia, su estética, su visión del mundo resplandecen en estas memorias.» Chicago Tribune

«Unas memorias divertidas, tiernas, reflexivas y astringentes… Aquí está el mejor Anatole.» Alfred Kazin

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, New York, History, Biography Memoir, Biography, Autobiography

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death.

After his death, Broyard became the center of controversy and discussions related to how he had chosen to live as an adult in New York. He was criticized for failing to acknowledge his black ancestry.

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

I'm always intrigued at the serendipities of my reading life, how the books I choose echo each other, or echo things that are happening to me when I'm reading them. But I help serendipities to happen by my particular reading choices, you might say, and it's true, though I'm still surprised at how often they can happen totally spontaneously.

Having said that, when I go on a trip, I deliberately choose books I know in advance will fit with the things I hope to experience, more or less ruling out any serendipitous happenings. Such was the case on a recent trip to New York when I decided to take Anatole Broyard's memoir Kafka Was the Rage along with me. I chose it because it was set in Greenwich Village where I knew I'd be staying.

Broyard's memoir covers a couple of years right after the Second World War. During the war, he was on active service, and he missed books so badly that when he left the army, he opened a secondhand bookshop on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village—and that's how he came up with the title of this memoir. It was a time when Kafka was all the rage in New York but Broyard found it difficult to stock enough of his books to supply the fans. For that and other reasons, Broyard didn't keep the bookshop open very long, but it was interesting to read about his time in the book trade all the same.

The Village was as close in 1946 as it would ever come to Paris in the twenties...I realize that people still read books now [1980s] and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books—I’m talking about my friends and myself—went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

No need to tell you how much I identify with that paragraph. Sometimes I think I too become the books I read and that I make them part of my own history.

When the bookshop project folded, Broyard enrolled at a college and attended lectures by such famous names as psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and art historian Meyer Schapiro. I particularly enjoyed Schapiro's take on one of my favourite artists, Cézanne:

I remember Schapiro telling us that before Cézanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cézanne’s landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping.

Broyard quotes a critic of the time who claimed Schapiro only 'valued a painting in proportion to the ingenuity you needed to appreciate it', the 'leap', in other words.

At the time, Broyard was living with an abstract artist he calls Sheri Donatti (real name Sheri Martinelli) in her apartment at 23, Jones Street in the Village, so he was steeped in the world of modern art, a world he'd felt excluded from while growing up working class in Brooklyn between the wars. He's honest about his inability to make Schapiro's 'leap' in spite of attending every one of his lectures, and in spite of his very clued-in girlfriend (when I looked her up, I discovered that Sheri was a muse to many famous writers and artists at the time).

Modern painting was one more exclusion, one more mystery from which I was shut out. I used to feel this way when people talked about politics, but I didn’t mind so much because I wasn’t interested in politics. And besides, I secretly thought I was right. I thought that being a Communist was a penalty you had to pay for being interested in politics. It was the adolescence of politics, an awkward stage you had to pass through. But when it came to modern art, I was afraid that maybe the others were right, that I would never be hip or sophisticated, would never belong. I’d never know that smug sense of being of my time, being contemporary. Perhaps this sounds like a fuss over nothing, but when you’re young, everything matters, everything is serious. And besides, I was living with a modern painter, I slept with modern painting. The life we led depended on modern art. Without that, all we had was a dirty apartment.

I walked down Jones Street, which was very near where I was staying, and found number 23 where Boyard had lived with Sheri. I looked up at the windows on the fourth floor—whoever lives there today keeps them quite clean. I also walked the length of nearby Cornelia Street but didn't find any trace that there had ever been a bookshop there.
I didn't find the police station on Charles Street either, the one where Broyard was investigated for the theft of a painting. It wasn't serious theft because it was a portrait of himself that he felt he had a right to after he and Sheri split up—she had frequently used him as a model.

I mention that minor episode because of something that happened to me when I was in New York. I visited all the bookshops I could find in the area, including a lovely little one in Greenwich Village called Three Lives & Company. I went to The Strand north of Washington Square with its mix of new and second-hand books, plus the Barnes & Noble further up on Union Square, and several others as well. But it was while I was in Barnes & Noble that something happened that mirrored Broyard's stolen portrait incident a tiny bit. I had decided to take a break from combing the bookshelves and had gone to the café space on the first floor. I sat down at one of the smallest tables with my sandwich, and when I'd eaten it, I began to read a bit more of Broyard's book. Then a man interrupted me to ask if he could sit on the spare chair. I didn't feel I could refuse although I didn't like sharing the small table with another person. Anyway, I carried on reading my book, trying to ignore that there was someone sitting opposite me. But then something caused me to look up. The person opposite me was looking right at me in the most intense kind of way. It was a bizarre moment. Then I realized that what he was actually doing was making a sketch of me reading my book. I remembered the many times I've sketched people in the past so I smiled and let him continue. But because I'd been reading Broyard's portrait incident, I began to think that maybe the sketch belonged to me. So when he finished drawing, I asked him if I could have it. It was in a notebook and he was unwilling to tear out the page so I took out my phone to photograph it instead. He hesitated but I insisted. I felt he'd taken something from me so I could take something from him. And I'm glad to report that no one ended up at the police station!

There were a few other minor moments that had me feeling my experiences in New York were mirroring Broyard's but I hesitate to call then serendipitous. For example, sitting in Washington Square listening to buskers and watching children playing ball and adults playing chess. He describes the very same scene—but so would you if you found yourself there (though you might not be thinking about Henry James which both Broyard and I were doing while we sat there). Or attending a basement jazz session where one of the pieces I heard was by Charlie Parker. Broyard talks about hearing Charlie Parker live at just such a basement session.

But will you believe me if I tell you there was another totally serendipitous moment in my ten day visit? Ok, here it is: I'd spent a day in the MOMA, where incidentally I saw several paintings Broyard mentions in the book, and I was walking down 7th Avenue towards Greenwich Village in the late afternoon. I happened to look at the map on my phone to see what distance I still had to walk when I noticed I was at the intersection with 23rd Street, the street on which the Hotel Chelsea is located. I knew I couldn't pass such an iconic place without calling in—many musicians, artists, and writers are associated with it—so I took a right and was soon walking into the dark foyer full of dimly lit paintings by former residents. I looked around for something by Robert Maplethorpe, a portrait of Patti Smith perhaps, but no such luck. Anyway, I figured since I was there, I'd have a drink at the bar. The bar is named for Don Quixote—there's a statue of him in the corridor outside—which makes it not an inappropriate place to pull out a book and start reading.
So there I was serenely sipping my Manhattan and reading the last section of Broyard's book. In it there's an episode about a party down in the Village where Broyard got to hang out with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin. But Caitlin was so drunk that particular night that the poet, himself very drunk but unwilling to leave the party, asked Broyard if he'd call a taxi for Caitlin and take her home. So Broyard accompanied Caitlin all the way to her home-away-from-home at the Chelsea where I was sitting when I read that page in the book—a book that turned out not to have a single other mention of the Chelsea in all its pages! That moment was as sweet as my Manhattan. I'll remember it well!

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it's because I just finished reading Incognegro, a thin graphic novel that leverages the idea of "passing" into a lot of interesting narrative turns, that I found Kafka was the Rage frustrating. I often was drifting to the story that Broyard does not tell, the one where he is a black man passing as white in an environment that prides itself on being open minded and bohemian.

It does not help that he essentially dares us to think about this untold story when he writes passages like "To use one of their favorite words, they were alienated. I was not. In fact, one of my problems was that I was alienated from alienation, an insider among outsiders" or even more to the point "I don't think I was anti-Semitic. In the 1920s in New York City, everyone was ethnic -- it was the first thing we noticed... We accepted our ethnicity as a role and even parodied it." It's like a thinly veiled roman a clef, where the clef is "I really didn't want to be black."

There is also another story that Broyard does not directly tell -- the way that New York is a city that always seems to be allowed to write its own narrative. Actually subtitled A Greenwich Village Memoir, this book is yet one more love letter to "the City", where, we are told, people read and screwed better than they did anywhere else. Because of how books get published and perpetuated, I have a hard time believing Kafka would have made it if Broyard was hyperbolically claiming so much in celebration of Des Moines or Sao Paulo. I'd like to watch how literary connections and the allure of NYC influenced each step of this book, from the publisher's advance to the first set of reviews.

And as I imagine and construct these hidden stories, I wonder if they dovetail into each other. Was Broyard aware that to become a writer he had to position himself in the New York literary world, and that it would be easier to do so if he was white? Was this literary desire the primary basis for his decision? It seems at least plausible given how much he claims to love books. That story would have been one I'd have been more interested to read.

What did make it to the page isn't particularly engaging. He hooks up with a girl, decides she's crazy, parties with some famous and semi-famous writers, and then wraps up the whole thing with a series of vignettes of all the women he nails after dumping the crazy girl. I was surprised to find that this last part, which could have easily been the most annoying and self-indulgent section of the book, was where Broyard really did his best writing, and the results were often lyrical and stunning.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone simply must -- okay, well should -- read the last chapter of this memoir, at the very least. It is thick with insight and knowledge about the potential alienation and disabling awkwardness of sex. Here's just one excerpt that really caught my eye:

"In Portnoy's Complaint, Portnoy says that underneath their skirts girls all have cunts. What he didn't say -- and this was his trouble, his real complaint -- was that underneath their skirts they also had souls. When they were undressed, I saw their souls as well as their cunts. They wore their souls like negliges that they never took off. And one man in a million knows how to make love to a soul."

When I read this last chapter, in particular, I couldn't help but think that, sexually, we are not nearly as liberated as we think we are. While it [sex:] is certainly more a part of everyday life, and flaunted on the television screen, in photos, etc., I am not so certain that anyone knows what to make of it . . . I still see people [myself included:] stumbling about in dark lit spaces, saying a prayer for salvation.

Kisses to Lauren for getting this book on my shelf.

[Nicholas Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does anyone on goodreads identify with the following description from this book:
“It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing.”

Just curious.

I love this book for the sheer amount of times it gave me pause over it’s resonant phrasings and intriguing insights like the one above. I’m realizing this is kind of a measure of a good book for me: How many times does it force my hand to mark things down.

When I’m really enjoying a book it's usually from some combination of the crisp and/or dazzling sentences, the mot juste and/or original wordplay, the arrestingly evocative imagery and descriptive passages, and it’s also the high degree of difficulty can’t-be-taught philosophically astute passages. Those are arguably the toughest to toss off (anyone can write a pretty sentence now and then), and Broyard shovels out generous helpings of them in this slender volume.

He is fantastically accurate on twenty-somethings arriving in the city with their weird pretensions and longings to be interesting and the desires for self-reinvention they suffer and explore.
e.g.
‘We had known only domestic emotions...I wanted to trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions. I could lead a hypothetical life, unencumbered by memories, loyalties, or resentments. The first impulse of adolescence is to wish to become an orphan or an amnesiac. No one in the village had a family.’

At one point he visits a shrink and fears, hilariously and paradoxically, of boring him. ‘I had an unreasonable desire to avoid saying anything he’d heard before...In avoiding boredom you transcend yourself and were cured. I had come there not to free myself of repressions but to develop better ones.’

When his enigmatic artist girlfriend, Sheri, who is always confounding him, tries to kill herself with the gas stove, he reflects, ‘I was less worried about the gas than I was getting the point.’

Later, when he finishes his art history class and visits his staid parents to find his Sheri sitting on his mother’s lap, he notes, ‘It was so grotesque that for a moment I thought I was back in class looking at Guernica or a de Kooning.’

Regarding Morris Dickstein’s takedown review of this book in the Times, I disagree that Broyard makes himself superior to those around him in these pages. Yes he is candid and caustic rather than flat out flattering in his assessments of those around him, but he also lauds their talents and charms. An he doesn’t spare himself either. On his breakup with Sheri he admits, ‘She tried to help me, make me more elastic, or fantastic, more modern. She had tried to lighten me, to teach me how to float, to rescue me from my simplicity.’

Dickstein also accuses him of forming his life into perfect sentences rather than getting wrapped up in the passion of what he’s describing. There’s some truth to that but for me the perfection of the sentences makes it worth it. Even Dickstein concedes these are sentences of ‘chiseled brilliance.’ Broyard also mocks himself for this inclination of his towards literary remove from his actual life, saying that the he and his shrink discuss his life not as patient and analyst, but as two literary critics discussing a novel.

Like Patti Smith in Just Kids, though her crowd is more rakishly artistic as befit the punk times, Broyard is right there in the mix with a ton of prominent writers, artists, and thinkers in their heyday. Sheri Donatti, Delmore Schwartz, Milton Klondike, Meyer Deren, Anaïs Nin - and his professors at the New School are a famously brilliant lot of writers, critics, and philosophers, among them Eric Fromm, Gregory Bateson, Meyer Shapiro.

Apparently when he received his cancer diagnosis Broyard stopped writing this book to focus on writing another book, ‘Intoxicated with My Illness’, which is also a highly revered work. Good for him. Let’s aim to read that one someday too.

But it’s unfortunate for this slender volume, because things do seem a bit rushed in the end, not to mention sex-fixated. Basically after he and Sheri part ways he just starts cataloguing every girl he got to sleep with. Now, even with an acknowledgement (or generous assessment if you prefer) that Broyard is commenting on the times—on the repressed sexuality of his generation and their slow Greenwich village-fueled awakening—it still does not make for a nuanced read.

Whereas part of Anthony Keidis’ memoir ‘Scar Tissue’ is something of a paean to the women he loved and was inspired by, part of Broyard’s memoir is just a paean to the female body.

Then again Broyard died before he could finish this book. One is left wondering what shape the narrative might have taken after these lusty youth-soaked years, what kind of commentary he might have offered on his evolution into an adult family man.

[Paul Secor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I never had much interest in Anatole Broyard's writing when, years ago, he reviewed books in the NY Times. In this memoir, he comes across as an egotistical poseur. The only time he dropped the pose was when he wrote about the death of his friend, Saul.

Given my aversion to Mr. Broyard's writing, you may wonder why I read this book. I read it for one simple reason. A Goodreads friend, Fionnuala, wrote a wonderful review of it. (Actually, it's as much a telling of her adventures on a visit to Manhattan, when she read the book while she was there, as it is a review of the book.)

Here's a link to Fionnuala's review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I would urge you to read it and leave Kafka Was the Rage on the shelf.

[Joshua Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this 2 days ago and have since returned to Henry Miller's Sexus. There is a perfect contrast between the two authors.
Broyard: the pretentious intellectual, who wants to be part of the literary crowd, lives in angst, not knowing what he's doing, where he's going, and what his life is for, and experiences extreme loneliness.
Miller: happy-go-lucky, carefree, living for the sake of existence, not trying to be anything and hanging out with whoever he pleases.
Broyard brought up a lot of unresolved conflicts, especially in regard to loneliness. Miller almost feels like a resolution. Loneliness does not matter if you are living in the here and now. Once you give up attachment, you realise your place in the perfect fit of the natural world, connected to everyone and everything.
Now, I don't mean to compare their worth. However, the overarching feeling in reading about Greenwich Village was a nostalgia for what I've missed, and a fear that life could actually be like that - the perfect environment for the intellectual's growth, and yet so empty. It's a fantastic memoir, but highly unsatisfying (Broyard got sick before he completed it and could never get back to it). I sometimes wonder about the value of reading angsty works, since they bring up so much in me. Now I'm rambling.

[Ciara · Rating 1 out of 5]

i am willing to concede that my dislike for this book is maybe just really subjective. it was recommended to me by a former writing teacher who absolutely RAVED about it & went into fits of ecstasy describing the way all of her writing friends soaked up the descriptive torrents of prose & felt that they were transported back to post-war greenwich village, etc etc. me...not so much. the book tops out at right around 120 pages & the only thing with a bigger font is "highlights magazine for children". i kept expecting a compare & contrast starring goofus & gallant on the best way for broyard to finally break things off with his painter girlfriend. i read the whole thing in seriously, maybe an hour. & pretty much the whole book was just descriptions of broyard having sex with his painter girlfriend. the book is a memoir & it really bummed me out to think about this old guy who has ostensibly lived a rich & satisfying life, sitting down to write a memoir about his formative years dscovering himself as a writer in the village after returning home from fighting in world war two, & how all he could come up with was 120 pages of 16-point font on boning a woman he dated for like a year. & of course, as with almost all men's descriptions of their wild & crazy bachelor sex lives, the whole thing was glazed with a patina of off-putting misogyny. the only part i liked was when broyard & the painter girlfriend visit anis nin & broyard observes that her teeth look false. but even then, he was just trying to imagine anais in the sack with henry miller. come on.

in sum, super disappointing.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely book, the somewhat fragmentary memoirs of Broyard’s time in Greenwich Village, c. 1947, with memories of Delmar Schwartz, Meyer Schapiro, sex in 1947 before the sexual revolution, Caitlin Thomas, Sheri Martinelli, etc.

[Grace Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I had conceived of lovemaking as a sort of asking and answering of questions, but with us it only led to further questions, until we seemed to be locked in a philosophical debate. Instead of the proverbial sadness
after sex, I felt something like a semantic despair.”

“According to him, we feared freedom, saw it as madness, epistemology run amok.”

“I knew it was their souls they were selling”

"She talks as I write, as if I had
created a language for her feclings."

“I began to think of love as weight. When I had her in my arms she seemed more tangible, more palpable.”

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

“She said that boredom was a domestic
emotion.”

“She never spoke when I wanted her to, only
when it didn't matter.”

“How shrewd it was of her to bring her heart into it when she hardly had a heart, to suggest it might fail or break.”

“To be ordinary might lead to sentimentality,
and he was more afraid of sentimentality than he was of being alone.”

“He had always behaved as if understanding was everything.”

“at the moment when she smiled, I saw
her as the incarnation of meaning.”

[Nikki · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first, I was enthralled. The writing was full of lovely but apt similes and lots of talk about New York in its bohemian heyday. I could read that kind of thing all day long, and I was prepared to do so. But soon I started to notice that he relies on similes a little too much (in fact, I should say way too much, to the point of parody) because he doesn’t really know how to write an actual scene – with movement and dialogue. He mostly likes to capture an image. This memoir is like a bunch of textual photographs, like flipping through someone’s old yearbook without getting any of the juicy details or conversations. A real disappointment.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memoirs would not have such a bad reputation if they were all this spare, this precise. Plus, it doesn't hurt that he's writing about life in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, what it was like to own a bookstore before the paperback revolution, when "people would rush in wild-eyed, almost foaming at the mouth, willing to pay anything for Kafka," having sex when "sex was like one of those complicated toys that comes disassembled, in one hundred pieces, and without instructions," when painters like van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso were "not old masters but revolutionaries; and we still believed in revolutionaries." The structure of the book is imperfect. It's obvious he didn't have time to finish it before he died. But what's there is very good. I love his analogies: "She was an abstract painter and I couldn't follow her there. She left me outside, like a dog that you tie to a parking meter when you go into a store." I wish he would have written more books.

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book about Greenwich Village in 1946, when Broyard was 23, returning from war, and could buy a storefront to start a used book store for under $300. Sex was a great mystery, abstract art was worshiped and despised, you could take a class at the New School with Erich Fromm or Karen Horney, or you could end up at a party with Dylan Thomas. An incredible time.

Broyard's chapter about a Jewish friend who is ill is one of the most gorgeous depictions of friendship with someone you both admire and don't truly understand that I've ever read. The chapter on sex is a reverie on how sex was viewed before the 1960's: he manages to depict the feelings of women in ways that few male authors can do.

He has an extraordinary ability to pull us into an era that has been idealized. Broyard also idealizes it, managing to make it seem real, though, and that's quite a feat.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anatole Broyard reportedly "hated" the work of the Beat writers. This slim memoir is Broyard's own view of his New York world. Broyard describes this as a valentine to post-war New York. Of course everyone thinks New York used to be so user-friendly, a place where writers and artists could live cheaply and survive on a part time job in a used book store.

Memoirs can be a bit idealized, but even so, reading this is more than enough to make someone want to live in post war (that is, post World War II) New York. It seems to be the world lately has been marching backwards in terms of being a civilized place to live. Mostly, it seems, people used to be much happier with much less.

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a Greenwich Village Memoir. More like a memoir of the author's early sex life, with a few people and streets from the Village circa late 1940s thrown in. For a lover of all things New York history, this book was a HUGE disappointment. Broyard spends the majority of it writing about his discovery that sex is good, and spends very little time on the city, the music, the art, even the apartments, of NYC that guarantee an interesting read.

And for some excellent writing in the area of semi-autobiographical, social reflection and sexual exploration, go with Henry Miller and Anaiis Nin. Broyard felt like a sad copy.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an unfinished fragment, so there's that.

But it was easy to read, very epigrammatic, subtle, and suffused with unique and complex insights.

Interesting how it does seem to carry you into that world of 50's era Greenwich Village without even necessarily going into epic detail about it. Broyard was there, he lived it, he makes some slightly oracular observations from time to time, but if you have always had the kind of smoky, hazy, nostalgia for the personal histories you never actually had, as I do, then this is unmissable.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I recently read Joseph Tabbi's biography/critical study of William Gaddis I learned that in postwar New York City Gaddis had been intensely attracted to a young abstract artist named Sheri Martinelli. Tabbi used the word muse in describing Gaddis's regard for her. And he directed me to the Anatole Broyard memoir of that time in Greenwich Village, Kafka Was the Rage. I'd read it when it was 1st published in paper--over 20 years ago--but didn't remember Gaddis or Sheri. So I pulled it down off the shelf and began to look into it and, captivated by it this time where I hadn't been in 1997, read it again.

Broyard calls her Sheri Donatti. In The Recognitions she's the model for one of the central characters, called Esme. But she knew many others, artists and writers of the period, apparently affecting them all. She was said to have been a lover of Ezra Pound during his St. Elizabeth days and considered the true meaning of muse. She appears in several of his Cantos of this period; in Canto XCI she's Undine. David Markson and Larry McMurtry also put her in novels. E. E. Cummings collected her art.

Anatole Broyard writes a compelling book about his living in Greenwich Village during the 1940s after the war, not only compelling for the news he tells of Martinelli but also because he was a lyrical writer. He was affected by Martinelli, too. Gaddis may have wanted her, but Broyard lived with her. He breaks his memoir into 2 parts: "Sheri" and "After Sheri." Surely it says something when a man looks back on his life and writes about it in the ways men do in trying to recall a particular time, a time when Kafka was the rage in the artistic and intellectual vulcanism of postwar Greenwich Village, that he hinged his book on Sheri, devoting 92 of 149 pages to her. Her artistic temperament was too much for him, and he knew it. She scared him, though he never regretted his time with her. She was a formative woman for him.

Sheri was my primary interest in reading the book again, she and how her persona pushes against Gaddis's fiction, but Broyard's book has other values. He writes very well about the Village of the time and what it was like to live there in that lively intellectual hothouse. Broyard knew many of those painting or writing works which would become significant. And he writes penetrating portraits of them, so that we see Auden falling down in his famous espadrilles outside a bookshop, awkward Delmore Schwartz buying a suit, and Dylan Thomas swollen by drink or sorrow or poetry or all three drinking at a party while his wife Caitlin dances in another room with her dress lifted over her head. He remembers the jazz and he remembers how serious sex was at the time, "as much a superstition, or a religious heresy, as it was a pleasure." Sex, he wrote, was modern art. And Sheri, remember, was a modern artist.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greenwich Village in the 1940s, the East Village in the 1960s, Bed-Stuy today: the scene may have drifted, but the mannerisms of artsy, precocious (and pretentious) lit-bros and -chicks have changed but little. Gaddis skewered them perfectly in The Recognitions; Broyard has no intention of that. Everything he says is autobiographical, including meetings with Anaïs Nin, Maya Deren, Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, and many other avant-garde superstars. But more importantly, it's completely sincere. Broyard has a wonderful nature, kind and free of pretensions. He plays down his own gifts as a jazz critic to praise the artists and writers around him, seeing past their vanity and personal problems and underlining instead their creative brilliance.

He wrote this unfinished memoir on his deathbed in the 1980s with undisguised nostalgia, and he casts its warm glow over everything that happened back then. And so you get a picture of a well-spent youth in an age just recovering from two wars, daring to think the unthinkable and tear down the old taboos. People live in small, run-down apartments, drink imprudently, read obsessively and fill the streets with talk of ideas. I couldn't stop underlining.

[Roman Kurys · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, the good news is I managed to finish it. Mainly because it is so short.

To be fair, memoirs aren’t my thing, but every now and then I like to venture out of my normal reading comfort zone just to see what is out there.

I saw the time frame and that it’s about NYC and though this could be interesting, and it was at times. I expected some more literary forays, like the part where he was scavenging around a local bookstore. I loved that part. I’ve read it twice.

That was just about the only part I enjoyed.

The first half of the book, where Anatol was with Sheri made me mad every darn page. It radiated toxic relationship and he just kept coming back.

In the second half, things got better, and then it sort of ended...

I don’t think its a spoiler in this specific case when I tell you that this book is not finished. Anatol Broyard died, before he had a chance to finish it.

This is something that I feel I should have known up front...as a reader, I probably would have picked a different memoir. Unless, of course, I was a hardcore fan of the author.

So all in all, if you enjoy memoirs, I’d probably say don’t pay any mind to my thoughts.
But if you’re experimenting, like me, I’d strongly suggest you pick a different memoir. This one was just...meh.


Roman

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fabulously novelistic memoir.

Broyard's writing is, in a word, whimsical. He writes stuff like "To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world." He writes of literature in a way that is reverent, dumbstruck and honest.

Reverent, dumbstruck and honest could describe the book as a whole. It's full of too-cool characters, but Anatole never presents himself as especially intelligent or hip. He's the G.I. with the crew cut going out with the Anais Nin wannabe. He writes of himself as having literature instead of a personality, or as, in his words, someone "a book could escape into." His escape from self-congratulation is quite special, and something rather uncommon for a memoir.

Most importantly, this is a book that simply makes you feel cool. There's loads of juicy literati namedropping, and the reader can pat themselves on the back whenever their behavior aligns itself with Broyard's.

Highly recommended, especially to college-age students.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

If only Bellow could have novelized Broyard like he did Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom! What a book that've been!

[thirdbaseintherye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anatole knows what it is to be a reader, someone trying on different literary personas. While some read to temporarily replace and escape their own thoughts with those of others, he writes more for the young man who wants to dress his own thoughts, to learn how to name the world around him, landscapes, people, sexual encounters, comparing them all to whatever he read last night. Described by Anatole reading has never sounded so like an action, it is a harpoon thrown to tether him to whatever it plunges into. Aside from reading sex is the second great center of this book, Anatole loved sex in all it’s uncomfortable glory, seemingly enjoying the way that people of his era made it all the more passionate by forbidding it. In a lot of ways he’s like a beat writer but sort of reverse Kerouac who’s embarrassed by his primitive side and trying to act more intellectual. He would rather play the detached scholar than the vital, rollicking artist, this sometimes contradicts his reason for reading that I wrote of above. Reading this during quarantine makes me eager to burst out of containment and hopefully into some new cultural scene, like the one that awaited Anatole after his service in WWII. As agonizing as it was reading about so much sex and conversation in a time utterly devoid of it, it’s made me realize what about both are so essential. This book is a celebration of life but is also not afraid to dissect and rearrange it. It has a self awareness that does not subtract from its momentum. Also encountering all the different literary and historical characters make it like an Assassin’s Creed game or something! Though I was promised Gaddis by the blurb on the back and he made no appearance...

[Chris Molnar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m really fascinated by Anatole Broyard, and in this memoir, how he dances around the thing he hid but will always be remembered for - passing as white while the main NYT book critic in the ‘70s - and instead composes these tight little vignettes about ‘40s bohemianism is tragic and engulfing.

It’s not even just avoiding that subject, either (which, amazingly, he ethered a now-forgotten rival author for bringing up fictionally, savaging him in the paper), but also that, say, that it’s William Gaddis he fought with over his love interest from the first half of this book, or that he abandoned his first wife and child (both Black, too) in order to be this “free”. Taking Delmore Schwartz to the club in Harlem as an “expert” on the dancing there without really copping to why, or gazing with an ironic eye as Maya Deren and Caitlin Thomas dance to exotic Haitian drum music, his cautious and shamed talk of his parents, everything is infused with omission, and often that central one.

As with Molly Brodak’s memoir, the omissions don’t take away from the completeness, the coiled power - they just make it infinitely melancholy, opening up unresolvable questions that someone lost so deep in their own obfuscations could never answer, only enact as they play their own character, forever.

[Jan C · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started as a 4 and I think finally ended up as a 2 1/2. His widow has a note at the end of the book, that Anatole had intended the final chapter to be about being brought down to earth by his father's death. She actually thinks that he was brought down to earth by becoming a father.

I guess I thought this book would be more about living in Greenwich Village, and some of it was. But it seemed to be far more about his sexual conquests. It may have meant a lot to him in looking back on his life, but it is of limited value to the average reader. Some of it is gossipy about various poets we may have heard of that were around in the late '40s. He apparently had a bookstore but the first notice I had of it was when he said he closed it. Either I wasn't paying attention (which is entirely possible) or he barely even mentioned it.

[Ruth Collier · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful little book. It's a tiny snapshot, beautifully and uniquely observed, of a few moments in time and I wish the author had lived long enough to put more of these moments to paper. The section about Saul Silverman is incredibly touching considering how few pages are spent on him.
This book won't give you any solid facts about Greenwich Village in 1946/1947. But it captures the feelings of one person's unique experience of it, and that feeling is incredibly comforting. I wanted to curl up and both devour the book in an evening and also draw out the reading as long as I could.

[Zeph Webster · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

The strength of the prose makes this a worthy little snapshot of a space and time—Greenwich Village, 1946, but personally I would have liked more tactile descriptions throughout. Broyard's descriptions of abstract entities like time and sex and literature are great in a macroscopic view of the scene at large, but I would have liked it more if there were more lived-in details of everyday scenes. Especially regarding Sheri.

[Jake Rubenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't usually read fiction during the semester - this was a pleasant escape from translingualism incommensurability false equivalency blahhh

beautiful love letter to new york city — makes me feel the same way I do on a solo subway trip or brisk walk into the village with my headphones in and my eyes wide. i loved all the jabs and commentary on post-war intellectual culture ... get this book away from me i want to be a bohemian

a bit short and aimless towards the end, but evokes intense feelings for me — a portal out of the staid academo-burban medford life ...

[Karla Huebner]

This brief (unfinished) memoir about life in 1946 Greenwich Village was a delight to read. Nostalgic, quirky, rich with simile, a reflection on what it's like to be twenty-something and in a big city, obsessed with literature and sex. Broyard imagined that the vibe in Greenwich Village was different then than in other times and places, and of course that's necessarily true, but it's also not true; San Francisco in the 1980s (as I experienced it) had much in common with his Greenwich Village and I'm sure so have many cities in many decades.

Not all readers have taken to this book. I looked up Broyard's Anais Nin-disciple paramour and learned that her real name was Sheri Martinelli and that she did indeed figure in many interesting people's lives, but while Steve Moore's quite interesting tribute to her in Gargoyle Magazine quotes liberally from Broyard, Moore assumes that any difference between Broyard's version and Martinelli's own must be a fabrication by Broyard. This seems implausible to me. Broyard doesn't seem to have much reason to invent the dirty apartment, disinclination to wear underpants, or late-night suicide attempt, while Martinelli would have had reason to forget or conceal such things. Perhaps when I'm elderly I too will claim that I never had a dirty apartment, always wore underpants, and never contemplated suicide. Or perhaps I'll take the opposite tack and claim, equally falsely, that I always had a dirty apartment, never wore underpants, and actually attempted suicide. We can't predict what we'll do or say in our waning years when refining our personal legends.

Likewise, Moore and some readers here imply that Broyard's having avoided mentioning his black ancestry makes him an unreliable narrator, or at least a cad. Well, I really don't think so. The man was born at a time when you didn't generally tell the world that your family was "passing"--the whole point of passing as anything is to hide what makes you an outcast, after all. We're not yet in a post-racial world, but we are at least in a world where mixed-race Americans don't usually need to hide the fact, which is quite a change from how things were during most of Broyard's life. I also don't find Broyard misogynist. He was in his twenties and full of hormones, but also interested in his women's personalities. That seems perfectly normal. Most people in their twenties are full of hormones, and many are much less likable about it.

I do agree with a reader who decided that Broyard got too carried away with simile. It's true, but I didn't really mind. I don't make heavy use of simile myself, or even provide much description of characters as a rule, which may be either a virtue or a fault in my writing, but perhaps for that very reason I rather enjoy wild use of simile in a writer like Broyard. I think he gets away with it (mostly) because his writing is so lean in most other respects. It's part of that combination, which I found appealing, of the intellectual and the self-aware with the sensuous.

[Bakunin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly good. I really did quite enjoy reading it. The author - Anatole Boyard - paints a vivid picture of the intellectual climate of the 1940's.

[sofia gigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

would be so much better if it was written by a woman like he needs to stop perceiving women asap

[Steffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

In dem autobiografischen Text des späteren Times-Kritikers wird ein lebendiges Bild des Greenwich Village im Jahre 1947 entwickelt. Alle sind auf der Suche nach Literatur, Kultur, Freiheit (nach Kriegsende) und ... nach Sex. Und letzterer ist scheinbar nicht immer so leicht zu finden, aber auch von einer geheimnisvolleren Aura als in späteren Jahre umgeben. Das intellektuelle Klima wird stark von der New School of Social Research geprägt, und damit von den Psychologen, Philosophen und anderen Denkern aus Europa, die hierher vor den Nazis flohen. Literatur scheint in dieser Zeit so notwendig wie die Luft zum Atmen und die Auseinandersetzung mit vielen heute noch namhaften Literaten macht den besonderen Reiz beim Lesen aus.
Was man dem Buch zunächst nicht anmerkt: Der Verfasser, der sich seinen Leben lang als Weißer ausgab, war eigentlich schwarz. Selbst seine Kinder erfuhren über seine Herkunft erst wenige Tage vor seinem Tod. Das erinnert sehr an die Geschichte, die Philip Roths in Der menschliche MakelDer menschliche Makel erzählt – Roth hat das übrigens abgestritten. Vor diesem Hintergrund lesen sich aber auch einzelne Passagen des Buches anders. Wenn Broyard Jazz als kitschig und sentimental beschreibt und von Geschwätzigkeit in der schwarzen Kultur spricht, scheint er sich nicht nur geschmacklich abgrenzen zu wollen und wenn er über das Judentum seines besten Freundes schreibt, setzt er sich ebenfalls mit dem Anderssein einer Randgruppe auseinander – dabei sind seine Äußerungen weder rassistisch oder antisemitisch, sondern vor allem Ausdruck seiner Zeit und dem Versuch sich selbst zu definieren.