There's More To Life Than Books

On Anatole Broyard and the Limits of Literature

Dear Republic,

For your weekend long-read, we have a lovely essay from Matthew Morgan about reading and re-reading Anatole Broyard’s Greenwich Village memoir —and coming to grips with the appropriate role that artificial constructions like “intellectual community” or “literary criticism” should or shouldn’t play in our lives. As Morgan writes: “My father was a man who worked with his hands, and I envied that the purpose of his work was obvious, self-evident in the physical product of his labour, and sometimes I worried that my work was mental masturbation, and this stuff in Kafka Was the Rage didn’t help.”

-ROL

THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN BOOKS

I.

Twenty years ago, back when I’d first started telling people I was a writer, I was in a second-hand bookshop looking for books that would fill out my picture of what it meant to say I was a writer. On a lower shelf where the dust had been left to rest, I found a little hardback only a hundred pages and change, a memoir called Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard.

I looked for somewhere to sit with the book. The shop was full of warm light and dark shadows and so much hardwood the whole place looked sepia toned. The bookshop was easy to romanticise with its self-conscious affectations, like the life-beaten armchair next to a green banker’s lamp beside a stack of the London Review of Books. I was getting more than a book from this place; I got reinforcement of the literary cliché I hoped to become.

I sank slowly into the leather armchair for about three minutes while the seat exhaled the accumulated farts of previous sitters, then I opened the memoir. I did what I often do with unknown books: flipped two-thirds in and read a random paragraph, trying to outsmart a lazy writer putting his showiest stuff on the first page and coasting for the next hundred. I read this line: “Pricing an out-of-print book is one of the most poignant forms of criticism.” Son of a bitch, I thought. I’m in.

Kafka Was the Rage turned out to be a collection of first-draft fractures written in final-draft prose, a memoir of Broyard’s mid-century wilderness years in Greenwich Village after the war. If you wanted to be a writerly expat like Hemingway, you no longer had to go to Paris. In the Village, rents and restaurants were cheap, which made you feel “that happiness itself might be cheaply had.” The bars, also cheap, were hangout joints for artists and the people like Broyard who wanted, needed, to be near them. At the Washington Square fountain, you could find would-be novelists tossing footballs with poets. Nearby, “girls just out of Ivy League colleges looked at the landscape with art history in their eyes.”

Here, Broyard discovered he had “a literature rather than a personality,” much like his friend Dick Gilman, a serial monogamist who’d fall in love with a new writer every few months and do everything to become that writer, dressing like him, talking and thinking like him, eating the same foods and professing the same politics. He even came with a blurb: “Dick was only twenty-one,” people said, “and he had read more books than Hemingway.”

Broyard had all the wide-eyed optimism of a young writer in a nascent epoch, pissing in the sink of his low-rent apartment and arguing about modern art as if opinions were the material out of which new worlds were made. I’d never pissed in my sink, but I was also at the start of what I felt in my soul would be a great literary career.

Two decades after Broyard entered Greenwich Village, he started writing book reviews for The New York Times. Two decades after that, he was dead. Two decades later, I found a first edition of his memoir, and after two decades again, I wasn’t the writer I’d planned to become. I thought the distance between expectation and reality might be measured in the changing reaction to a book over time, so I went back to Kafka Was the Rage to see what was different.

II.

Kafka Was the Rage was written in the thrall of nostalgia, and I knew I’d be dabbling in my own nostalgia when I re-read it. There was no going back to the blind self-certainty I once had (that you need to have, at the start of an artistic career), but I wanted to remember what that piss-and-vinegar self-belief felt like. That’s what I told my wife at the breakfast table when she remembered that I used to rave about this book when we first met but hadn’t mentioned it since.

“Thoreau wrote something,” I said, wincing as I realised I was a man almost of a certain age, quoting Henry David Thoreau. I hoped this wasn’t the start of a mid-life crisis that ended with a cabin in the woods. “He said the young man gathers materials to build a bridge to the moon, but the middle-aged man decides to build a wood-shed with them.”

She wiped flakes of croissant from the sleeve of her dressing gown. “You want to pull down the wood-shed?”

“No. But I’d like to see the blueprints for the moon bridge again.”

“Hm.” She’d seen something already in the slouch of my posture. “Is the book like you remember?”

I didn’t want to express my disappointment outright, which would only coagulate my feelings, so I told her that I used to thrill at lines like, “Literary criticism is the art of bitter tastes.” It sounded wry and knowing, not quite concrete enough to argue against without sounding like you suffered an irony deficit. Irony, back then, was the gold standard. That was why I assumed the apparent sincerity with which Broyard wrote “If it hadn’t been for books we’d have been completely at the mercy of sex” was more sardonic than earnest. Nope.

There was a bit in the introduction where Broyard said he’d written a lot of sex in the book, but “none of it is casual — all of it is paid for in feeling and consciousness.” Maybe that was why he didn’t seem to enjoy any of the sex he wrote about. The organ he was using was in his skull rather than his pants; he kept thinking his way out of the experience and into abstraction, like when he wrote:

[Sex] was a postwar thing, a kind of despairing democracy, a halfhearted form of suicide. It was a freedom more than a pleasure, perhaps even a polemic, a revenge against history.

Maybe sex could be thought of that way outside of the fact, in the lonely lamplight at the academic desk, but I would have bet real cash that no one in the middle of sex had ever thought, “This is the best revenge-against-history of my life.”

I read a scene to my wife where Broyard carried his girlfriend up a flight of stairs and was surprised that, despite her slender frame, she was heavy, which led him to declaim, “You might say that she was metaphysically heavy.” That got an eye roll from my wife. “You might say that,” she said, “but I definitely wouldn’t.” His search for profundity had led him away from the weight and gravity of the world, here being the fact that he was weak.

There was a lot of this in the chapters about Sheri, his girlfriend, who “looked more like a work of art than a pretty woman”. Her flesh and blood seemed less significant to Broyard than the idea of her as “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”. I was reminded of Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who men kept seeing as a concept. “I’m just a fucked up girl looking for my own peace of mind,” she insisted. “Don’t assign me yours.”

This tendency toward abstraction almost got Broyard killed. One night, he woke suddenly with the intuition that something was up. He found Sheri in the kitchen, slumped over the stove with the gas turned on, filling the apartment with fumes. Broyard took in the scene like an art critic assessing a landscape in oils, wondering what aesthetic or moral message could be gleaned from his lover’s attempt at suicide. What metaphor could be found in the hiss of the gas, in his lover’s death pose? What poetry could be made of these prosaic facts? Eventually, he had the bright idea to turn off the gas and take Sheri back to bed.

Some of this stuff annoyed me. My father was a man who worked with his hands, and I envied that the purpose of his work was obvious, self-evident in the physical product of his labour, and sometimes I worried that my work was mental masturbation, and this stuff in Kafka Was the Rage didn’t help. Much of it, however, was far more than annoying. It pointed to the cost of prioritising ideas — and, eventually, ideology — over people.

III.

Soon after arriving in Greenwich Village, Broyard opened a bookshop with money he’d made on the black market in Tokyo while visiting on Uncle Sam’s dollar. It was an international cause designed to overcome the “domestic emotions” of Americans. Books, he hoped, would reveal “what happens to emotions when they are homeless”.

Broyard bought a place from an old Italian junk dealer for three-hundred dollars, on the condition that he move the dealer’s stock to a new location. He hired a truck and lugged out the “old boilers, radiators, bathtubs, sinks, pipes of all sizes, and miscellaneous bits and pieces of metal.” He emptied the building of all this stuff, which people made things out of and used for essential repairs, to make room for his “homeless emotions.”

The hope was for studious customers who revered this shrine and the high priest behind the counter. Instead, Broyard got people who saw the bookshop as “a place of last resort, a kind of moral flophouse.” To his disappointment, he found that many of his customers only came into the shop when they had nothing better to do, and that they apparently had no friends, or hobbies, or resources of any kind. These were the people Broyard disparaged as “the talkers”:

It was the talkers who gave me the most trouble. Like the people who had sold me books, the talkers wanted to sell me their lives, their fictions about themselves, their philosophies. ... [T]hey told me of their families, their love affairs, their illusions and disillusionments. I was indignant. I wanted to say, Wait a minute! I’ve already got stories here! Take a look at those shelves!

Broyard made a metaphor out of the clutter he’d shifted from the shop earlier:

As they talked on, I thought of all the junk I had carried out of the shop — the boilers, bathtubs, and radiators. These people were bringing it all back — all the clutter, the cast-off odds and ends of their lives.

I knew the customers Broyard was talking about. I’d been a bookseller for a year when I first read Kafka Was the Rage. It wasn’t my own bookshop, but I had the freedom of talking about books all day without the managerial hassle of spreadsheets and taxes and payroll. The kind of person Broyard complained about also spent their time in the bookshop I worked for. I’d spoken to them, occasionally sold them a book, but mostly I listened to them. They were usually trying to make sense of themselves in the attempt to make sense to me.

There was a woman who demanded we turn off the “hideous” music we “assaulted” our customers with, and when we pointed out that we had no music and she was hearing a street musician she’d passed on her way into the store, she walked outside and dropped some change into his guitar case, smiling. She came back in, a different woman, and told me about her years working for a clothing store where, every Christmas, holiday music poured through the store’s sound system and a few weeks later someone quit or killed themselves (there were several suicides over her career). Though she knew better than to draw a link between these things, she still got furious whenever she heard “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

There was the man in a corduroy blazer who’d stand at the till and recite a review of the latest bestseller from The Guardian as if they were his own words. Asked to elaborate on a point, or if a bookseller gently disagreed with “his” take, he’d stare through your face like he was rebooting and perform the review again. He did this every couple of weeks for about a year before we found out (though I never knew who first discovered this or how) that he’d wanted to be a book critic when he was young, but his mother — who’d died a year earlier — had insisted only “losers and nonces” did that kind of work.

Another time, a woman came in to complain about the dishevelled state of our carpets. Her eye contact was like a challenge, demanding that I care as much as she did about the carpet in a store she only came into so she could complain about its carpet. This kept happening until one day she accidentally changed her own script by comparing the soggy leaves packed into our carpet to the dry crumbs stomped into the carpet of her son’s bedroom: “You think someone else will clean up for you. Well, I’m not doing it!” The shop fell silent. She looked surprised for a second, then left and never came back. She’d made some kind of breakthrough, and given new meaning to the idea of retail therapy.

For a long while I resented these customers and their intrusions on my literary life. I wished they would talk about books, especially the books I liked. I was desperate for a salon to form organically, local artists and intellectuals coming through the bookshop as part of the cultural scene that (I was deludedly certain) would one day be written about this time and place.

I was a snob. And I adored Kafka Was the Rage, in part, because the young Broyard it depicted was also a snob, particularly when he wanted to snatch certain books out of the hands of certain customers, intuiting through his acute sense of pretentiousness that the book they’d picked from the shelf “was obviously beyond them”. He could tell “by their face, their clothes, by their manners, the way they moved, that they’d misread the book or get nothing out of it.” He approved of Mallarmé smugly insisting his books should never be read by “a person of average intelligence and insufficient literary preparation.”

This was around the time when people were first starting to worry in the broadsheets (there was no Substack yet) about how no one read books anymore because of our phones, our technology, our diminishing attention spans. That was all true, no doubt, but at the bookshop I found the greatest impediment to readers picking up a book was the anxiety that they had “insufficient literary preparation.” Over time, it became my mission to convince people that the only preparation they needed was the book itself. Try it, read it, talk about it with a friend. Come back and talk about it with me, please!

The surprising thing was that people started to do that. They’d ask me which translation was easier to understand, and we’d look through a few together; they’d wonder if it was okay to take breaks from reading Infinite Jest, and I’d tell them, faux whisper and pretend conspiracy, that it was okay to stop reading it altogether and read something else; they’d confide that If on a winter’s night a traveller was a lot of fun, as if they knew they’d missed the point, that it should have only been stoically intellectual. The more they asked, the more I had to start doing the asking because I rarely had anything like a full answer.

One of the first times I surrendered to my ignorance was with one of our regulars, a little guy in his fifties who hunched over like he was trying to fold into himself. He was shy about his thinning hair, his voice, about absolutely everything except for his weekly order/pick-up of hentai comics. The covers were sexual enough to embarrass the booksellers, but he let them sit there on the counter next to his wallet while he counted out change. One day, I got the nerve to start a conversation, to ask him if these books were part of some series or stood alone, and he gave me the whole history of hentai and his favourite artists and recommended some titles to start with. The whole time he was talking about these semi-pornographic comic strips, his voice never wavered and he didn’t glance away.

Over time, it began to seem meaningful to me, or at least helpful to them, when I provided the audience these talkers were looking for. And all the stuff I was reading began to seem useful, more valuable. This was something my literary life lacked and books couldn’t substitute for: that I felt more full (more solid on the planet and more sated) in the company of fellow readers than in the solitude of reading.

IV.

Broyard’s buddy Saul Silverman was a talker, but not like the talkers from the bookshop who drove Broyard crazy with the smallness of their stories and narrowness of their lives (which is to say, how ordinary they were). Instead, Saul was full of “high seriousness”, which meant something like “being intimate with largeness, worrying on a grand scale,” and it was wrapped up in redemption. “Our ideas,” Broyard wrote, “would save us from our sins.”

What Saul needed saving from wasn’t sin, in the end, but sickness. At first, Saul thought he had a flu that was going around. Then he thought it was mono. He disappeared from public life for weeks, until one day he called Broyard and asked him to visit. His illness was serious.

“How do you mean, serious?” Broyard asked.

Saul laughed, then he stopped. He said, “High serious.”

The next day, Broyard and Saul took a walk through Prospect Park. Broyard studied his friend in sideways glances, “trying to gauge how sick he was”. Saul, meanwhile, was “looking around at the park as if he was taking notes, summing it up, trying to arrive at a definition of the ideal park”.

It was all words, words, words for Saul. Here he was turning lemonade into lemons, missing the innate, untranslated goodness that Broyard was finally noticing: the vendor selling kosher frankfurters; children racing by on skates and bikes; couples walking dogs; squirrels and pigeons on the path. Simple, but true and good.

Then Saul revealed just how sick he was. He knew Broyard would insist the doctors had “misread” something (a telling word) and that, philosophically speaking, nothing was certain, and he’d try to remind Saul of the book Seven Types of Ambiguity. “But,” Saul said, “there is no ambiguity — I’ve got leukemia.”

Hearing this, Broyard couldn’t look his friend in the face, so he looked away from Saul’s sickness and towards the lake.”

The tragedy of this situation wasn’t so much that Saul was dying — it was that he was beginning to glimpse how he might have lived better, might still live more fully with whatever time he had left, if only he could work out how. He told Broyard that he finally understood what he’d missed with his head in his books. “For example,” he said, “I see now that the world is a more beautiful place than I had supposed. Look at this park — I’ve never noticed it. If I had my life to live over again, I’d read more Wordsworth.”

It was the non-sequitur between the world and Wordsworth that made me throw down the book in frustration — not with the author or the book itself, but with the men it depicted, who saw the beauty of the world and thought the best response was to read more. It was like someone pointing at a sunset or a baby’s smile or some other miracle of the mundane to say, Look! Look at this wonderful thing! but Saul just kept looking at the outstretched finger.

I’d been Saul and Broyard once, and we’d each been like the young men in Borges’ infinite library who “prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter.” We worshipped but didn’t understand, and our faith that everything of value existed in books had, as Borges cautioned, turned us into phantoms.

In my phantom existence, I’d always choose to read instead of sitting outside with friends, or going for a meal, or going on one of the dates I frequently made then postponed until the woman lost interest. I thought Fernando Pessoa was right about literature being the most agreeable way to ignore life. (Despite my allegiance to irony, I’d decided he wasn’t being ironic.) My world existed within four cheaply painted walls, my posture devolved to fit the curl of my armchair, and my social life was drip-fed with hangouts whenever friends got sick of hearing, “I can’t tonight, guys, I’ve got to read/write.”

I remember clearly the evening that all changed. I was standing at my stove, stirring some pre-cooked food replica with plastic flavours and zero nutritional content — learning to cook would have taken time out of reading and writing — when my phone rang. I ignored it until it stopped ringing. A second later, it started ringing again. I answered while thinking up three different reasons I couldn’t do whatever it was that whoever was calling wanted. It was a friend who was currently on a supremely awkward date. For some reason, he thought it would be less awkward if other people joined them.

“I’ve just started cooking dinner… ”

“Come on, man, it’ll be fun.” The way his voice strained told me that a) it would not be fun, and b) she was listening to the conversation. The food could be re-reheated in the microwave, but I was planning a late night with a long book. He said please again, and the fact that I wasn’t a total asshole (only myopic and boring about books) made me agree to one drink.

That one drink lasted an eternity of small-talk, fumbled punchlines and half-laughs, and silences that stretched the distance between all three of us. Finally, I finished my beer and said, “Well, I’d better get back to my dinner.” I was putting on my jacket when a woman walked in who made books no longer look like the most interesting thing I could spend the rest of my life with. She was another of my friend’s emergency calls, but she’d taken longer to get here. I slipped my jacket back off and said, “I can stay for one more.”

Fifteen years later, I read her this description of our first meeting and told her I didn’t know how to avoid the cliché of writing “Reader, I married her.”

She said she had no idea either, and she was trying to cook a fresh veggie lasagne for our dinner, so could I leave the kitchen and get back to re-reading Kafka was the Rage.

I returned to Broyard’s walk with Saul, which was coming to an end even though there was plenty left to say. Saul wouldn’t hear it. None of it was literary or high-minded enough, and he was determined to die the way he lived, as someone analysing life from the outside rather than muddling around in it. “It was typical of him,” Broyard thought, “to give a new meaning to the expression critically ill.” And Saul refused to let his friend visit him again:

He wouldn’t let me come back because he couldn’t bear the simplicity of being sick, the ordinariness of it. […] To be ordinary might lead to sentimentality, and he was more afraid of sentimentality than he was of being alone. Sentimental was the cruellest word in literary criticism.

Saul was “blinded by reading” like Don Quixote, his mind turned to mush from spending too much time with his books. This was the madness that destroyed the best minds of Broyard’s generation. But maybe, finally, Broyard wised up to what was lost when he kept the world at the distance of a page, a truth discovered in seeing Saul at the end: “I saw, with a kind of horror, that books had been everything to him.”

V.

When I got to the postscript of the book, I discovered (and remembered on re-reading) two things important for understanding Kafka Was the Rage and, by extension, its author. The first was that Anatole Broyard died three years before the book was published, incomplete but together enough to tell some kind of story. The second was that the story it told was not the story Broyard wanted the finished book to tell.

The postscript was written by Broyard’s widow, Alexandra. In it, she wrote that Broyard became sick in 1988 and set aside the memoir to write about his illness. He died before he could return to the memoir and finish it, but he’d intended for the last part to be about the death of his father, which he wrote about in a letter to his publisher.

Everything I’d read suddenly made a new kind of sense, like that rabbit-duck picture Wittgenstein used to show how something can look different depending on how you view it. So I read the book again, more sympathetically. It was stunning what I’d overlooked in my first reading, and it was galling that I’d missed it a second time. This time, I noticed a line about Broyard’s communist friends whose “Platonic idea of American life” had left them (to use their pet word) alienated. He saw how “their politicizing of experience abstracted them from the ordinary, from the texture of things”. Then came this telling sentence:

“The young intellectuals I knew had virtually read and criticized themselves out of any feeling of nationality.”

Later, there were more self-aware (and self-mocking) winks at the reader that made me suspect that the middle-aged writer was not as emotionally obtuse as the young man his memoir described.

Broyard knew how he came off in these pages and never intended to uncritically repeat the dogmas of his youth. The memoir we got was the setup to the book he planned, in which he started by floating in clouds of abstraction, until life brought him “back down to earth”.

It seemed to me that coming down to earth meant something like “touching grass”. It meant remembering in the body what the world was made out of. It wasn’t all dreams and ideas, abstractions that stretched out the fabric of being; It was about your relationship to the world, distant or close, up there in the sky or down here on the ground.

How did Broyard eventually find a place in the world? Alexandra wrote in her postscript:

Anatole, in my view, came back down to earth by becoming a father. He came back down to earth by writing about books for The New York Times, being immersed in literature. Words supported his spirit. And books provided the work that supported his family and home. They were the ballast, the lifeline that gently, gradually, lowered him back down to solid ground…

It was a few weeks ago that I re-read Kafka Was the Rage, and now I think about it every time I close the door to my study, shutting out the world to get some writing done. There’s something that draws certain people into the clouds. The feeling of earth beneath your feet is wonderful, but the feeling of flying isn’t nothing either. Still, I can’t fly forever, and when I try, I inevitably crash hard. The earth can sustain me in a way the sky can’t.

Matthew Morgan writes Volumes, a Substack about the places where books and life overlap.