Broyard’s columns were suffused with both worldliness and high culture. Wry, mandarin, even self-amused at times, he wrote like a man about town, but one who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips. Always, he radiated an air of soigné self-confidence: he could be amiable in his opinions or waspish, but he never betrayed a flicker of doubt about what he thought. This was a man who knew that his judgment would never falter and his sentences never fail him.
Grand-Jean knew little about Broyard’s earlier career, but as he rummaged through Broyard’s bookshelves he came across old copies of intellectual journals like Partisan Review and Commentary, to which Broyard had contributed a few pieces in the late forties and early fifties. One day, Grand-Jean found himself leafing through a magazine that contained an early article by Broyard. What caught his eye, though, was the contributor’s note for the article—or, rather, its absence. It had been neatly cut out, as if with a razor.
A few years later, Grand-Jean happened on another copy of that magazine, and decided to look up the Broyard article again. This time, the note on the contributor was intact. It offered a few humdrum details—that Broyard was born in New Orleans, attended Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research, and taught at New York University’s Division of General Education. It also offered a less humdrum one: the situation of the American Negro, the note asserted, was a subject that the author “knows at first hand.” It was an elliptical formulation, to be sure, but for Anatole Broyard it may not have been elliptical enough.
Broyard was born black and became white, and his story is compounded of equal parts pragmatism and principle. He knew that the world was filled with such snippets and scraps of paper, all conspiring to reduce him to an identity that other people had invented and he had no say in. Broyard responded with X-Acto knives and evasions, with distance and denials and half denials and cunning half-truths. Over the years, he became a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation. Some of his acquaintances knew the truth; many more had heard rumors about “distant” black ancestry (wasn’t there a grandfather who was black? a great-grandfather?). But most were entirely unaware, and that was as he preferred it. He kept the truth even from his own children. Society had decreed race to be a matter of natural law, but he wanted race to be an elective affinity, and it was never going to be a fair fight. A penalty was exacted. He shed a past and an identity to become a writer—a writer who wrote endlessly about the act of shedding a past and an identity.
Anatole Paul Broyard was born on July 16, 1920, in New Orleans to Paul Broyard and Edna Miller. His father was a carpenter and worked as a builder, along with his brothers; neither parent had graduated from elementary school. Anatole spent his early years in a modest house on St. Ann Street, in a colored neighborhood in the French Quarter. Documents in the Louisiana state archives show all Anatole’s ancestors, on both sides, to have been Negroes, at least since the late eighteenth century. The rumor about a distant black ancestor was, in a sense, the reverse of the truth: he may have had one distant white ancestor. Of course, the conventions of color stratification within black America—nowhere more pronounced than in New Orleans—meant that light-skinned blacks often intermarried with other light-skinned blacks, and this was the case with Paul and his “high yellow” wife, Edna. Anatole was the second of three children; he and his sister Lorraine, two years older, were light-skinned, while Shirley, two years younger, was not so light-skinned. (The inheritance of melanin is an uneven business.) In any event, the family was identified as Negro, and identified itself as Negro. It was not the most interesting thing about them. But in America it was not a negligible social fact. The year before Anatole’s birth, for example, close to a hundred blacks were lynched in the South and anti-black race riots claimed the lives of hundreds more.
While Anatole was still a child, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, thus joining the great migration that took hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks to Northern cities during the twenties. In the French Quarter, Paul Broyard had been a legendary dancer, beau, and galant; in the French Quarter, the Broyards—Paul was one of ten siblings—were known for their craftsmanship. Brooklyn was a less welcoming environment. “He should never have left New Orleans, but my mother nagged him into it,” Broyard recalled years later. Though Paul Broyard arrived there a master carpenter, he soon discovered that the carpenters’ union was not favorably inclined toward colored applicants. A stranger in a strange city, Paul decided to pass as white in order to join the union and get work. It was strictly a professional decision, which affected his work and nothing else.
For Paul, being colored was a banal fact of life, which might be disguised when convenient; it was not a creed or something to take pride in. Paul did take pride in his craft, and he liked to boast of rescuing projects from know-nothing architects. He filled his home with furniture he had made himself—flawlessly professional, if a little too sturdily built to be stylish. He also took pride in his long legs and his dance-hall agility (an agility Anatole would share). It was a challenge to be a Brooklyn galant, but he did his best.
“Family life was very congenial, it was nice and warm and cozy, but we just didn’t have any sort of cultural or intellectual nourishment at home,” Shirley, who was the only member of the family to graduate from college, recalls. “My parents had no idea even what the New York Times was, let alone being able to imagine that Anatole might write for it.” She says, “Anatole was different from the beginning.” There was a sense, early on, that Anatole Broyard—or Buddy, as he was called then—was not entirely comfortable being a Broyard.
Shirley has a photograph, taken when Anatole was around four or five, of a family visit back to New Orleans. In it you can see Edna and her two daughters, and you can make out Anatole, down the street, facing in the opposite direction. The configuration was, Shirley says, pretty representative.
After graduating from Boys High School, in the late thirties, he enrolled in Brooklyn College. Already, he had a passion for modern culture—for European cinema and European literature. The idea that meaning could operate on several levels seemed to appeal to him. Shirley recalls exasperating conversations along those lines: “He’d ask me about a Kafka story I’d read or a French film I’d seen and say, ‘Well, you see that on more than one level, don’t you?’ I felt like saying ‘Oh, get off it.’ Brothers don’t say that to their sisters.”
Just after the war began, he got married, to a black Puerto Rican woman, Aida, and they soon had a daughter. (He named her Gala, after Salvador Dali’s wife.) Shirley recalls, “He got married and had a child on purpose—the purpose being to stay out of the Army. Then Anatole goes in the Army anyway, in spite of this child.” And his wife and child moved in with the Broyard family.
Though his military records were apparently destroyed in a fire, some people who knew him at this time say that he entered the segregated Army as a white man. If so, he must have relished the irony that after attending officers’ training school he was made the captain of an all-black stevedore battalion. Even then, his thoughts were not far from the new life he envisioned for himself. He said that he joined the Army with a copy of Wallace Stevens in his back pocket; now he was sending money home to his wife and asking her to save it so that he could open a bookstore in the Village when he got back. “She had other ideas,” Shirley notes. “She wanted him to get a nice job, nine to five.”
Between Aida and the allure of a literary life there was not much competition. Soon after his discharge from the Army, at war’s end, he found an apartment in the Village, and he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend evening classes at the New School for Social Research, on Twelfth Street. His new life had no room for Aida and Gala. (Aida, with the child, later moved to California and remarried.) He left other things behind, too. The black scholar and dramatist W. F. Lucas, who knew Buddy Broyard from Bed-Stuy, says, “He was black when he got into the subway in Brooklyn, but as soon as he got out at West Fourth Stree
t he became white.”
He told his sister Lorraine that he had resolved to pass so that he could be a writer, rather than a Negro writer. His darker-skinned younger sister, Shirley, represented a possible snag, of course, but then he and Shirley had never been particularly close, and anyway she was busy with her own life and her own friends. (Shirley graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter College, and went on to marry Franklin Williams, who helped organize the Peace Corps and served as Ambassador to Ghana.) They had drifted apart: it was just a matter of drifting farther apart. Besides, wasn’t that why everybody came to New York—to run away from the confines of family, from places where people thought they knew who and what you were? Whose family wasn’t in some way unsuitable? In a Times column in 1979 Broyard wrote, “My mother and father were too folksy for me, too colorful. . . . Eventually, 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 out-distanced our history and our humanity.” Like so much of what he wrote in this vein, it meant more than it said; like the modernist culture he loved, it had levels.
In the Village, where Broyard started a bookstore on Cornelia Street, the salient thing about him wasn’t that he was black but that he was beautiful, charming, and erudite. In those days, the Village was crowded with ambitious and talented young writers and artists, and Broyard—known for calling men “Sport” and girls “Slim”—was never more at home. He could hang out at the San Remo bar with Dwight Macdonald and Delmore Schwartz, and with a younger set who yearned to be the next Macdonalds and the next Schwartzes. Vincent Livelli, a friend of Broyard’s since Brooklyn College days, recalls, “Everybody was so brilliant around us—we kept dueling with each other. But he was the guy that set the pace in the Village.” His conversation sparkled—everybody said so. The sentences came out perfectly formed, festooned with the most apposite literary allusions. His high-beam charm could inspire worship but also resentment. Livelli says, “Anatole had a sort of dancing attitude toward life—he’d dance away from you. He had people understand that he was brilliant and therefore you couldn’t hold him if you weren’t worthy of his attention.”
The novelist and editor Gordon Lish says, “Photographs don’t suggest in any wise the enormous power he had in person. No part of him was ever for a moment at rest.” He adds, “I adored him as a man. I mean, he was really in a league with Neal Cassady as a kind of presence.” But there was, he says, a fundamental difference between Broyard and Kerouac’s inspiration and muse: “Unlike Cassady, who was out of control, Anatole was exorbitantly in control. He was fastidious about managing things.”
Except, perhaps, the sorts of things you’re supposed to manage. His bookstore provided him with entrée to Village intellectuals—and them with entrée to Anatole—yet it was not run as a business, exactly. Its offerings were few but choice: Céline, Kafka, other hard-to-find translations. The critic Richard Gilman, who was one of its patrons, recalls that Broyard had a hard time parting with the inventory: “He had these books on the shelf, and someone would want to buy one, and he would snatch it back.”
Around 1948, Broyard started to attract notice not merely for his charm, his looks, and his conversation but for his published writings. The early pieces, as often as not, were about a subject to which he had privileged access: blacks and black culture. Commentary, in his third appearance in its pages, dubbed him an “anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world.” But was he merely an anthropologist or was he a native informant? It wasn’t an ambiguity that he was in any hurry to resolve. Still, if all criticism is a form of autobiography (as Oscar Wilde would have it), one might look to these pieces for clues to his preoccupations at the time. In a 1950 Commentary article entitled “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” he wrote that the Negro’s embarrassment over blackness should be banished by the realization that “thousands of Negroes with ‘typical’ features are accepted as whites merely because of light complexion.” He continued:
The inauthentic Negro is not only estranged from whites—he is also estranged from his own group and from himself. Since his companions are a mirror in which he sees himself as ugly, he must reject them; and since his own self is mainly a tension between an accusation and a denial, he can hardly find it, much less live in it. . . . He is adrift without a role in a world predicated on roles.
A year later, in “Keep Cool, Man: The Negro Rejection of Jazz,” he wrote, just as despairingly, that the Negro’s
contact with white society has opened new vistas, new ideals in his imagination, and these he defends by repression, freezing up against the desire to be white, to have normal social intercourse with whites, to behave like them. . . . But in coolness he evades the issue . . . he becomes a pacifist in the struggle between social groups—not a conscientious objector, but a draft-dodger.
These are words that could be read as self-indictment, if anybody chose to do so. Certainly they reveal a ticklish sense of the perplexities he found himself in, and a degree of self-interrogation (as opposed to self-examination) he seldom displayed again.
In 1950, in a bar near Sheridan Square, Broyard met Anne Bernays, a Barnard junior and the daughter of Edward L. Bernays, who is considered the father of public relations. “There was this guy who was the handsomest man I have ever seen in my life, and I fell madly in love with him,” Bernays, who is best known for such novels as “Growing Up Rich” and “Professor Romeo,” recalls. “He was physically irresistible, and he had this dominating personality, and I guess I needed to be dominated. His hair was so short that you couldn’t tell whether it was curly or straight. He had high cheekbones and very smooth skin.” She knew that he was black, through a mutual friend, the poet and Blake scholar Milton Klonsky. (Years later, in a sort of epiphany, she recognized Anatole’s loping walk as an African-American cultural style: “It was almost as if this were inside him dying to get out and express itself, but he felt he couldn’t do it.”)
After graduation, she got a job as an editor at the literary semiannual Discovery. She persuaded Broyard to submit his work, and in 1954 the magazine ran a short story entitled “What the Cystoscope Said”—an extraordinary account of his father’s terminal illness:
I didn’t recognize him at first, he was so bad. His mouth was open and his breathing was hungry. They had removed his false teeth, and his cheeks were so thin that his mouth looked like a keyhole. I leaned over his bed and brought my face before his eyes. “Hello darlin’,” he whispered, and he smiled. His voice, faint as it was, was full of love, and it bristled the hairs on the nape of my neck and raised goose flesh on my forearms. I couldn’t speak, so I kissed him. His cheek smelled like wax.
Overnight, Broyard’s renown was raised to a higher level. “Broyard knocked people flat with ‘What the Cystoscope Said,’” Lish recalls. One of those people was Burt Britton, a bookseller who later co-founded Books & Co. In the fifties, he says, he read the works of young American writers religiously: “Now, if writing were a horse race, which God knows it’s not, I would have gone out and put my two bucks down on Broyard.” In “Advertisements for Myself,” Norman Mailer wrote that he’d buy a novel by Broyard the day it appeared. Indeed, Bernays recalls, on the basis of that story the Atlantic Monthly Press, offered Broyard a twenty-thousand-dollar advance—then a staggeringly large sum for a literary work by an unknown—for a novel of which “Cystoscope” would be a chapter. “The whole literary world was waiting with bated breath for this great novelist who was about to arrive,” Michael Vincent Miller, a friend of Broyard’s since the late fifties, recalls. “Some feelings of expectation lasted for years.”
Rumor surrounded Broyard like a gentle murmur, and sometimes it became a din. Being an orphan of the avant-garde was hard work. Among the black literati, certainly, his ancestry was a topic of speculation, and when a picture of Broyard accompanied a 1958 Time review of a Beat anthology it was closely scrutinize
d. Arna Bontemps wrote to Langston Hughes, “His picture . . . makes him look Negroid. If so, he is the only spade among the Beat Generation.” Charlie Parker spied Broyard in Washington Square Park one day and told a companion, “He’s one of us, but he doesn’t want to admit he’s one of us.” Richard Gilman recalls an awkwardness that ensued when he stumbled across Anatole with his dark-skinned wife and child: “I just happened to come upon them in a restaurant that was not near our usual stomping grounds. He introduced me, and it was fine, but my sense was that he would rather not have had anyone he knew meet them.” He adds, “I remember thinking at the time that he had the look of an octoroon or a quadroon, one of those—which he strenuously denied. He got into very great disputes with people.”
One of those disputes was with Chandler Brossard, who had been a close friend: Broyard was the best man at Brossard’s wedding. There was a falling out, and Brossard produced an unflattering portrait of Broyard as the hustler and opportunist Henry Porter in his 1952 novel, “Who Walk in Darkness.” Brossard knew just where Broyard was most vulnerable, and he pushed hard. His novel originally began, “People said Henry Porter was a Negro,” and the version published in France still does. Apparently fearing legal action, however, Brossard’s American publisher, New Directions, sent it to Broyard in galley form before it was published.
Anne Bernays was with Broyard when the galleys arrived. Broyard explained to her, “They asked me to read it because they are afraid I am going to sue.” But why would he sue, she wanted to know. “Because it says I’m a Negro,” he replied grimly. “Then,” Bernays recalls, “I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ He said, ‘I am going to make them change it.’ And he did.”
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 45