This is an absolutely marvelous book about Greenwich Village just after the Second World War. It's wonderful in its depiction of that world, but it's also wonderful just because of the sheer joy of Anatole Broyard's writing.
It would be misleading to call Broyard a humorist, and yet it would be equally misleading not to do so. Here, for instance, is a comment by Broyard on Erich Fromm. Boyard was attending a course Fromm taught on the psychology of American culture at the New School for Social Research.
Fromm was short and plump. His jaws were broader than his forehead and he reminded me of a brooding hen. Yet, like everyone else, I sat spellbound through his lectures. I'll never forget the night he described a typical American family going for a pointless drive on a Sunday afternoon, joyessly eating ice cream at a roadhouse on the highway and then driving heavily home. Fromm was one of the first -- perhaps the very first -- to come out against pointlessness. It was a historic moment, like Einstein discovering relativity or Heidegger coming up against nothingness.
And here is a comment on Delmore Schwartz:
When Delmore described anyone, they regressed; they lost their saving graces, their scruples and hesitations. He made everyone else Dostoyevskian -- but in an anachronistic twentieth-century setting. His favorite trick was to take away their irony and leave them exposed. He was like the grammar school bully who rips open your fly buttons.
And here is Broyard talking about the experience of running a bookstore in Greenwich Village.
I realize that people still read books now 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.... If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been completely at the mercy of sex. There was hardly anything else powerful enough to distract us or deflect us; we'd have been crawling after sex, writhing over it all the time. Books enabled us to see ourselves as characters -- yes, we were characters! -- and this gave us a bit of control.
This is a book that breaks my heart in several ways. For one thing, Broyard has done very well something that I have tried to do, with much less success, on another part on my web page: namely, he has given a series of marvelous snapshots of a period of his life, usually three or four or five paragraphs long. Most of them are the sort of thing you immediately want to read aloud to the whole world.
This is the sort of writing that you can't describe in a review or critique. The only way to tell people about it is to quote from it. And so I will do that -- more than I should.
But beyond that, this book has a very personal meaning for me in at least a couple of ways, and is one that I am unable to write about objectively. To me personally, at least, many of the things Broyard writes in this book have such an enormous importance that I just have to do everything I can to draw the attention of the rest of the world to them.
Broyard is dead now -- in fact, he died before completely finishing the book. He has heirs, of course, who hold the copyright, and I can only hope that they (and his publisher) will see my somewhat overextensive quoting from his work as a way of letting the world know about it, rather than an attempt to steal their property.
The first half of the book is mainly about a woman who Broyard was living with when he first got to Greenwich Village in 1946. He has given her the name Sheri Donatti.
Sheri [that was in fact her first name] was a woman I knew myself in Washington, D.C. about ten years after the time Broyard writes about. At that time, I was seventeen or eighteen years old and she must have been in her late thirties. By then, she had changed in a lot of ways from the woman Broyard had known in 1946, and yet a lot of the things he writes about her brought back a lot of memories for me.
Sheri Donatti had the kind of personality that was just coming into vogue in Greenwich Village in 1946. This was a time when Kafka was the rage, as were the Abstract Expressionists and revisionism in psychoanalysis. Sheri was her own avant-garde. She had erased and redrawn herself, redesigned the way she thought at felt.She was a painter and she looked more like a work of art than a pretty woman. She had a high, domelike forehead, the long silky brown hair of women in portraits, wide pale blue eyes with something roiling in their surface. Her nose was aquiline, her mouth thin and disconsolate, her chin small and pointed. It was the kind of bleak or wan beauty people in Village people liked to called quattrocento.
... Yes with all this, all the affectation, there was something striking about her. She was a preview of things to come, an invention that was not quite perfected but that would turn out to be important, a forerunner or harbinger, like the shattering of the object in Cubism or atonality in music. When I got to know her better, I thought of her as a new disease.
... Living with Sheri was a process of continual adjustment. It was like living in a foreign city: You learn the language, the currency, the style of the people. You find out how to make a phone call, how to take the subway, where the stores and restaurants are, the parks, the public pissoirs, the post office. You try to feel like a native, not a foreigner; you progress from grammar to idioms in an attempt to talk as if you belonged. Still, you never succeed in feeling at home. You remain a visitor, perhaps only a tourist.
... Most people would say that lovemaking is a defense against loneliness, but with Sheri it was an investigation of loneliness, a safari into its furtherst reaches. She had a trick of suspending me at a high point of solitariness, when I was in the full flow of the self-absorption that comes over you as you enter the last stages of the act. She would stall or stymie my attempts to go ahead and finish -- she'd hold me there, freeze me there, as if to say, See how alone you are! And then I would float above her, above myself, like an escaped balloon.
As to myself, I was never Sheri's lover, although there were certainly times when she was roaring drunk and I certainly could have had sex with her if I'd been brave enough to.
For me, what is really poignant -- almost painfully so -- is Broyard's descriptions of her conversation.
Like everything else about her, her style of talking took some getting used to. She gave each syllable an equal stress and cooed or chanted her vowels. Her sentences had no intonation, no rise and fall, so that they came across as disembodied, parceled out, yet oracular too. She reminded me of experimental writing, of the ``revolution of the word'' in the little magazines of the thirties. She talked like a bird pecking at things on the ground and then arching its neck to swallow them.She went in for metaphors and reckless generalizations, the kind of thing French writers put in their journals. Everything she said sounded both true and false. At the same time I could feel the force of her intelligence, and some of her images were remarkable.
Sheri took Anatole to meet Anaïs Nin, who was living in New York at the time and thought of Sheri as her protege. The following passage describes Anais's style of conversation, which was a bit more ethereal than even Sheri's.
As I listened to Anaïs talk -- for it was understood that she did most of the talking, even if it was to ask us questions -- it occurred to me that she and Sheri deformed their speech as Chinese women used to deform their feet. Her talk was pretty much like the kinds of things she wrote in her diaries. And entry from this time gives a good idea of what she sounded like: ``Think of the ballet exercises. The hand reproduces resistance to water. And what is a painting but absolute transparency? It is art which is ecstacy, which is Paradise, and water.'' Here's another: ``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.''Her conversation flirted with all the arts and settled on none, like someone who doesn't really want to buy a book browsing in bookstore. I was careful about what I said, because I could see that Anais was important to Sheri. I was afraid of coming out with something literal-minded, like, Were you bothered by rats when you lived on the houseboat?
This pretty well describes the feeling I sometimes had myself, at age seventeen, when involved in conversations with Sheri.
Although I never got to meet Anais Nin -- she was well in Sheri's past by the time I knew her, and I don't remember Sheri even mentioning her -- I did have a chance, back then when I was still a high school student, to meet a few even more famous writers -- some of whose conversation was at least as obscure as Nin's.
And now, remembering that seventeen and eighteen-year-old self who, for a short time, was welcome in a world where conversations like that took place and was almost a part of that world, I have a feeling of enormous sadness.
I was not brave enough to enter into that world. It was too risky, too scary, too far outside the parameters I had been brought up to live within. So I took a safer path, and lost something very important.
A year or two after the time I first met her,
Sheri moved to San Francisco
to be part of the Beat scene,
although by that time it was already waning.
I spent a few weeks with her
there in San Francisco in 1959,
and then later encountered her again
when I moved to San Francisco in 1962.
But by then, she was no longer the same Sheri.
Here's another passage from Broyard.
I was always scribbling on little pads I carried around, jotting down ideas, phrases, images. Half of the young men in the Village were writing such notes. They wrote them down in cafes, in the park, even on the street. You'd see them stop and pull out their pads or notebooks to jot down something that had just struck them -- the color of the sky, the bend of a street, an incongruity. These notes were postcards to literature that we never mailed.
That pretty much describes the self that I turned away from, without even completely realizing that I was doing it.
Here on my web page I have tried to do something which normally I find impossible -- to tell people who I really am. I'm not sure that even people who know me will ever be interested enough to read enough of what is written here to ever understand what I'm trying to say about myself. (I've almost intentionally made it rather difficult to find one's way around the web page, so that if someone wants to find the really important stuff about me they pretty much have to read everything.)
But I'll say here: if anyone is ever interested enough to want to know who am really am, then a good start would be to read Anatole Broyard's book.
Important Footnote: There is a rather long article about Anatole Broyard by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the New Yorker, June 17, 1996 which is very worth reading. It casts an interesting light on many of the things in Broyard's memoir. About Sheri, Gates quotes Vincent Livelli, a friend of Broyard's since his days at Brooklyn College, to the effect that Broyard and William Gaddis (author of The Recognitions) were rivals for Sheri, ``almost at each others throats.''
The Broyard character in Recognitions was named Max, and Gaddis wrote, ``He always looked the same, always the same age, his hair always the same short length,'' seemingly ``a parody on the moment, as his clothes caricatured a past at eastern colleges where he had never been.''
The main thrust of the New Yorker article is the revelation that Broyard had been a light-skinned Negro. Although his skin was light enough to enable him to pass for white, his mother and sister (and all his known ancestors) were unmistakably Black. (His father, from what is known, had been a Negro, but with fairly light skin.) For Broyard, this was a dark secret that he devoted much of his life to concealing. There is certainly no hint of it in his book.
August 10, 1996