posted on 03 Apr 2016

Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

I think I discovered Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage as a consequence of reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Some years back it was alleged that Coleman Silk, the professor who ‘passes’ as white in The Human Stain, was based on Anatole Broyard, himself a Louisiana Creole of mixed race said by some to have ‘passed’ in the metropolitan literary world of New York city and the New York Times where he was literary editor, reviewer and columnist for eighteen years.

Roth strenuously denied using Broyard as a model – and indeed, whether or not Broyard did ‘pass’ is still hotly disputed. (Broyard himself never commented on this charge directly, I don’t think, although in a 1979 column he did say, “I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel…Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity.”).

In any case, this is not really significant as far as Broyard’s tragically slender but wonderfully readable output is concerned. He only published four books, and two of these came out after he died aged 70 in October 1990.

Kafka Was the Rage is a short, elegant, whip-smart memoir of life in Greenwich Village immediately after the war. It is written in a deceptively simple prose that is rich in short, epigrammatic paradoxes and self-deprecating wit. The first line I remember reading was this: “If it hadn’t been for books, we’d have been completely at the mercy of sex.” I was hooked.

Broyard writes of the Village as others did of Paris in the 20s – indeed, for him and his friends, Greenwich Village was Paris in the 20s: it was the place they migrated to in order to make an artistic, cultural, modern life of “high seriousness” (one of their favourite phrases, he says).

Intellectual ideas and the importance of ideas are central themes in this memoir, yet there is nothing po-faced or worthy about it. This is high seriousness done with humour; perhaps even the high seriousness of humour.

Fascinated by painting – literature was what Broyard really wanted but the New York school of abstract expressionism was a sort of gateway to high seriousness – Broyard moves in with a woman he calls Sheri Donatti, his first New York lover, an abstract painter and “a more radical version of Anais Nin”, whose protégé she had been.

Donatti, he says, embodied “all the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis”. She was “a preview of things to come, an invention that was not quite perfected but that would turn out to be important…like the shattering of the object in Cubism or atonality in music.”

He served in the US army during the war and used his discharge pay to open a bookshop in Greenwich Village. He realised, however, somewhat too late, that rather than offering high literary purpose, bookshops swiftly become “moral flophouses”, a magnet to “the kind of people who go into a bookshop when all other diversions have failed them”.

He undergoes psychoanalysis (in New York City in 1946 “there was an inevitability about psychoanalysis…It was like having to take the subway to get anywhere”) but realises that he doesn’t have a personality, he has a literature. He attends the progressive New School for Social Studies, where like many others he is intimidated by the guttural brilliance of the émigré German lecturers who “stalked the halls…as if it were a concentration camp where we were the victims and they were the warders, the storm troopers of humanism.”

In perhaps the most affecting section of the book his closest friend Saul Silverman dies from leukaemia. “Look at me,” Saul says, “I’ve hardly used this body. It’s the shoddy manufacture of the times. I’m practically new and obsolete already.” But how ill is he, Broyard wants to know – how serious is it? “High serious,” Saul says – of course.

Broyard hangs out with Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg and Delmore Schwartz; he meets Dylan and Caitlin Thomas; Sheri knocks WH Auden over and squirms beneath him, relishing every moment. But suddenly – and sadly – at just short of 150 pages, Kafka Was the Rage ends. There could have been so much more, and it would all have been as brilliant and as enjoyable, but at this point (it was 1989) Broyard was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he put the memoir aside temporarily to write about his illness and about death. Subsequently assembled by his wife, Alexandra Broyard (as was Kafka Was the Rage in fact), this is the book that became Intoxicated by My Illness.

Perhaps inevitably given its subject matter Intoxicated by My Illness is a less light-hearted book than Kafka – but only just, for it is informed by the same unflinching intelligence and a profound and unchastened humour that refuses to give in to cliché.

Unlike Broyard, his friends are not intoxicated by his illness. Overnight, they have ceased to be the witty, sceptical, dashingly intelligent people he once knew and are suddenly falling back on the “pious, inspirational things” everyone else says in the presence of death. But he cannot share their solicitude. “Like an existential hero,” he says, “I have been cured by the truth while they suffer the nausea of the uninitiated.” He is joking, of course, but as is so often the case, only just. In fact he is asking his friends to do exactly what his friend Saul Silverman asked him to do: “I want you to enter into a conspiracy with me, to join a movement, sign a manifesto, against the making of fusses.”

Both of these books deserve wider readership than they currently have. Kafka is bewitching and insouciant, while Intoxicated by My Illness ranks alongside other great writing on suffering and death, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, and Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others.

Once you have sampled the dense, concentrated, compacted intelligence of Broyard’s writing you will never forget it.

Alun Severn    March 2016