Customer Reviews

Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

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One brilliantly sunny day in July, I decided to head out to the lake to bask in the sun and read. Unforuntately, I realized halfway there that I hadn't bought anything to read. So, I trotted over to my local used bookstore and began browsing their recent acquisition table. This little volume immediately gained my attention. It looked like fun, it looked like it would be a quick read, and it was short enough that it wouldn't keep me from continuing in any of the other books that I was already reading. So, off to the lake with this book in hand I went.

KAFKA WAS THE RAGE was quite a nifty little read. I had read a fair amount about the Beats at one point, so this had some of the same post-WW II Manhattan atmosphere, but that was set more in the area of Columbia University, so this shifted the scene further south. There is no real story to tell here. Broyard merely recounts in a more or less anecdotal form a number of events and individuals from a particular moment in time. He has a gift for summoning up particular moments in vivid detail, and a talent for the brilliant line. An example of the former is his recounting of an adventure in which he took Delmore Schwartz, Clement Greenberg, and Dwight MacDonald to a Spanish Harlem nightclub. Another is his description of his art professor Meyer Schapiro.

Some great lines:

"I thought that being a Communist was a penalty you had to pay for being interested in politics."

[on Dylan Thomas] "To him, an American party was like being in a bad pub with the wrong people."

[on Delmore Schwartz] "Like Samuel Johnson, whom he resembled in many ways, Delmore was not interested in prospects, views, or landscape. He had looked at the city when he was young, and saw no need to do it again."

[on a painter friend] "His voice was soft, deep, and cultivated and his manners were a history of civilization."

As one might expect (and hope for) in a memoir set in such a vibrant era, the book is marvelous for its incessant name-dropping of famous individuals who pop up briefly as characters: figures as diverse as Erich Fromm, Maya Deren, Anais Nin, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Gregory Bateson, as well as the previously mentioned Schwartz, Greenberg, MacDonald, and Shapiro.

In 1947, Anatole Broyard was a 25 year old veteran who chose to live in Greenwich Village rather than return to his parents home in Brooklyn after the war. His family was New Orleans French and he was raised a Catholic. The Village at that time represented freedom and new ways of thinking. It was a world of artists and writers. A world of intellectual and sexual freedom. A world where the latest in psychological theory was being taught at the New School by leaders in the field. There was peace and prosperity and a bright new world for the young.

Especially since it was written in 1989, when Broyard was a writer with ripened talent, it is especially interesting. Broyard looks back at himself and the world as it existed then with a mature perspective and a sense of humor that kept me giggling as I turned the pages. His is not the voice of a disaffected beat generation; it is the voice of a wide-eyed young man coming of age at a time when anything seemed possible. He writes about abstract art, jazz, going to dance clubs in Spanish Harlem, meeting H.W. Auden and a funny incident with the wife of Dylan Thomas. There's a lot about sex and his various girlfriends. And apartments with bathtubs in the kitchen and a toilet in the hall. It is a history of New York as I've never quite seen it before.

At 147 pages, this book seems much too short and I understand from the postscript that he became ill before he had a change to finish it. Too bad. Because I thoroughly enjoyed it. And am so glad that his wife decided to publish it now. I love the writing. It's simple prose with lots of good thinking behind it. A pure delight to read.

The time for intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals to thrive was definitely in the late 1940's when barriers were falling and culture and mindscape were being reinvented by abstract painters, psychoanalysis, and changing attitudes about sexual freedom. Anatole Broyard writes about New York in 1947 from his perspective, as a World War II veteran coming home to new ideas and strange people. His vision is romantic and nostalgic, but he also recognizes the limitations of these times and his own feeling of being an outsider among outsiders. Being so immersed in the intellectual and sexual experiences of life, he longs for a more personal, emotional bond which he fails to find. Though Broyard could not finish the book before his death, it is still very much a worthwhile read if you love books, sex, and the excitement of cities.

When I started the book I was delighted early on that his female roommate, who goes everywhere pantiless, has already run into W. H. Auden and sent the two of them crashing to the floor of a bookstore. Oh yeah, and what's this guy smokin' on the cover?

This is an autobiography that delves into the art and literary scene of Greenwich Village during the late 40's, post WWII era. I was surprised to find that the author actually passed away before he finished writing this memoir. I can't imagine where he would have gone w/ it, but I'm sure we've missed out.

His writing is very circumspect, and the fact that it's not actually a 'finished' work does not matter. I enjoyed the book as I've said above. I found myself considering cubism, Auden, Anais Nin, the Village, studying art in college, sex from the perspective of a man of the times. Anatole (cool name) is a sensitive man, honest about the shortcomings of his era.

Plus I loved his crazy girlfriend. I appreciated his candor. What else can I say? When he says that the sex was hot, you'd have to believe him. Cool book.

I met Sheri (Martinelli was her real name) in a similar way about 12 years later, when she was in North Beach. Broyard is a good writer, and accurately conveys the devastatingly uplifting effect such an otherworldly encounter has on a very young man from a very conventional background. Recommended reading for any whose intelligence is only eclipsed by their sense of humor.

A formally unknown author to me until coming insistingly recomended by my girlfirend,Anatole very successfully retold his life experiences in post-WWII "avant-garde" Greenwich Village so that, while living in both a different generation and society, I could relate directly to his observations and reactions. That alone is the power of this memoir. Anatole through his experiences covers modern art, the music scene, and especially attitudes on sex. As with most memoirs, there is no plot; however, there is a great deal of character growth -- and if the reader takes a moment to reflect, to digest Anatole's delicate observations, he finds that when the final cover closes, he too has grown with the work. The memoir unfortunately goes unfinished due to Anatole's untimely death, but does not leave the reader unsastified.

If you're expecting an overview of the 1940s Greenwich Village scene, adjust your expectations. This is for the most part an account of Anatole Broyard's life, as he lived in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. The focus is on Broyard's concerns of the time and his particular perceptions. It is a distinct difference.

That acknowledged, I'd like to say that I recommend the book anyway. Broyard's account is valuable for its loving criticism of the 1940s art world, for its honest recognition of the stupidity of youth, and for its meandering remembrances, repleat with similes and earnest attempts to find meaning in the past. The book is valuable because of its examination of life, an examination that is all the more interesting for the time period and the location of the subject.

I said that Broyard's account was more an account of his own life than of the times. But it is also an opinion of mine that one life tells a lot about a time period. The setting for the memoir is New York just after WWII--the whole city is glad to be alive and glad to be carefree for the first time since the beginning of the war. And Broyard's account of himself and others in the period is fascinating for that reason, for the way this made people act. Need another reason? Broyard's memoir is peppered with chance meetings with prestigious artists and writers of the time. He exposes the mentality they all lived with--the way they lived with art the way other young people live with football or pop music. He exposes the advantages and disadvantages that that presented. Most of all, he exposes your youth--your own youthful pretensions, and stupidity, and wisdom. It's the account you would write if you had the time... And the insight.

Broyard brings a first-hand perspective to midcentury life in Greenwich Village, and offers some interesting insights into veteran migration at the end of WWII and pre-60s relations between the sexes. He overplays the wide-eyed sexual innocence of his life at this time, casting himself as the protagonist of Dawn Powell's *Golden Spur*-- he nevers mentions that by the time he returns from the war at age 26 he was separating from his wife and daughter. Instead, he portrays his stay at his parents' Brooklyn home until he moves into a girlfriend's apartment in Manhattan as a single young soldier's re-entry to the States. This type of self-editing was part of the author's writing style, given the way he handled a racial background that was finally explored by his daughter's memoir. Broyard had completed only two thirds of his memoir before putting it aside, and never returned to the volume to complete the story he wanted to tell or rewrite what he had already committed to paper. Despite the early-draft status of the memoir, he makes some good metaphors about his life amongst writers, artists, and ex-pat German psychiatrists associated with the New School.

My first reaction was, I wish I had been there too. As he said, the public was visually hungry at that time. Now the public is pretty much jaded in mho, but also, there are probably many more visual artists per capita than in 1947.
Other quotes I liked: pp129 On Delmore Schwartz, he was like the grammar-school bully who rips open your fly buttons. It was Delmore who helped me to understand what I came to think of as the malice of modern art.
pp134 The social history of the world is, in some ways, a history of censorship.

Broyard writes well, but I kept getting the feeling that these essays were a kind of first draft that needed to be fleshed out with more details and examples, as there were a number of unsupported generalizations here. Lots of name dropping of influential and inmportant people in literature and the social scene of the late 1940s in New York. I was not surprised when I reached the end of the book and found the postscript by Broyard's widow about how Anatole had put this manuscript aside when he learned of his terminal illness and worked on other things, i.e. his last book, Intoxicated by Illness. I think Broyard's meditations on the mysteries and frustrations of sex are better than what he has to say about books and literature. I remember reading John Barth's book, The End of the Road, many years ago in which he commented on sex as the being a powerful urge that is what drives innovation, invention and the progress of civilization itself - I'm not gonna look for his exact quote - and I was reminded of that when I read comments by Broyard like this one:

"The energy of unspent desire, of looking forward to sex, was an immense current running through American life ... It was fueled by failures, as well as by successes. The force of it would have been enough to send a million rockets to the moon ..."

I know that Broyard was an important NYTimes critic and a recognized writer, so I am probably being enormously arrogant in mentioning the shortcomings of this book, but I don't mean to be. I'm just quite certain that it would have been much better had he had more time to spend on it - to "finish" it. I feel sad that he was not allowed that time. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA