The novel went on to be celebrated as a ground-breaking chronicle of Village hipsters; it also—as a result of the legal redactions—reads rather oddly in places. Henry Porter, the Broyard character, is rumored to be not a Negro but merely “an illegitimate”:
I suspect [the rumor] was supposed to explain the difference between the way he behaved and the way the rest of us behaved. Porter did not show that he knew people were talking about him this way. I must give him credit for maintaining a front of indifference that was really remarkable.
Someone both Porter and I knew quite well once told me the next time he saw Porter he was going to ask him if he was or was not an illegitimate. He said it was the only way to clear the air. Maybe so. But I said I would not think of doing it. . . . I felt that if Porter ever wanted the stories about himself cleared up, publicly, he would one day do so. I was willing to wait.
And that, after all, is the nature of such secrets: they are not what cannot be known but what cannot be acknowledged.
Another trip wire seems to have landed Broyard in one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century American fiction, William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” Livelli explains, “Now, around 1947 or ’48, William Gaddis and Anatole were in love with the same gal, Sheri Martinelli. They were rivals, almost at each other’s throats. And Willie was such a sweetheart that he had a mild approach to everything, and Anatole was sort of a stabber: he injected words like poison into conversations.” When “The Recognitions” came out, in 1955, “Anatole caught on to it right away, and he was kind of angry over it.” The Broyard character is named Max, and Gaddis wrote that 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.” Worse is his “unconscionable smile,” which intimates “that the wearer knew all of the dismal secrets of some evil jungle whence he had just come.”
Broyard’s own account of these years—published in 1993 as “Kafka Was the Rage”—is fueled by the intertwined themes of writing and women. Gaddis says, “His eyes were these great pools—soft, gentle pools. It was girls, girls, girls: a kind of intoxication of its own. I always thought, frankly, that that’s where his career went, his creative energies.”
Anne Bernays maintains, “If you leave the sex part out, you’re only telling half the story. With women, he was just like an alcoholic with booze.” She stopped seeing him in 1952, at her therapist’s urging. “It was like going cold turkey off a drug,” she says, remembering how crushing the experience was, and she adds, “I think most women have an Anatole in their lives.”
Indeed, not a few of them had Anatole. “He was a pussy gangster, really,” Lucas, a former professor of comparative literature, says with Bed-Stuy bluntness. Gilman recalls being in Bergdorf Goodman and coming across Broyard putting the moves on a salesgirl. “I hid behind a pillar—otherwise he’d know that I’d seen him—and watched him go through every stage of seduction: ‘What do you think? Can I put this against you? Oh, it looks great against your skin. You have the most wonderful skin.’ And then he quoted Baudelaire.”
Quoting Baudelaire turns out to be key. Broyard’s great friend Ernest van den Haag recalls trolling the Village with Broyard in those days: “We obviously quite often compared our modus operandi, and what I observed about Anatole is that when he liked a girl he could speak to her brilliantly about all kinds of things which the girl didn’t in the least understand, because Anatole was really vastly erudite. The girl had no idea what he was talking about, but she loved it, because she was under the impression, rightly so, that she was listening to something very interesting and important. His was a solipsistic discourse, in some ways.” Indeed, the narrator of “What the Cystoscope Said” tells of seducing his ailing father’s young and ingenuous nurse in a similar manner:
“Listen,” I said, borrowing a tone of urgency from another source, “I want to give you a book. A book that was written for you, a book that belongs to you as much as your diary, that’s dedicated to you like your nurse’s certificate.” . . . My apartment was four blocks away, so I bridged the distance with talk, raving about Journey to the End of the Night, the book she needed like she needed a hole in her head.
Broyard recognized that seduction was a matter not only of talking but of listening, too, and he knew how to pay attention with an engulfing level of concentration. The writer Ellen Schwamm, who met Broyard in the late fifties, says, “You show me a man who talks, and I’ll show you a thousand women who hurl themselves at his feet. I don’t mean just talk, I mean dialogues. He listened, and he was willing to speak of things that most men are not interested in: literature and its effect on life.” But she also saw another side to Broyard’s relentless need to seduce. She invokes a formulation made by her husband, the late Harold Brodkey: “Harold used to say that a lot of men steal from women. They steal bits of their souls, bits of their personalities, to construct an emotional life, which many men don’t have. And I think that Anatole needed something of that sort.”
It’s an image of self-assemblage which is very much in keeping with Broyard’s own accounts of himself. Starting in 1946, and continuing at intervals for the rest of his life, he underwent analysis. Yet the word “analysis” is misleading: what he wanted was to be refashioned—or, as he told his first analyst, to be transfigured. “When I came out with the word, I was like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood,” he wrote in the 1993 memoir. “I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel. . . . I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.” He lived a lie because he didn’t want to live a larger lie: and Anatole Broyard, Negro writer, was that larger lie.
Alexandra Nelson, known as Sandy, met Broyard in January of 1961. Broyard was forty, teaching the odd course at the New School and supporting himself by freelancing: promotional copy for publishers, liner notes for Columbia jazz records, blurbs for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Sandy was twenty-three and a dancer, and Broyard had always loved dancers. Of Norwegian descent, she was strikingly beautiful, and strikingly intelligent. Michael Miller recalls, “She represented a certain kind of blonde, a certain kind of sophisticated carriage and a way of moving through the world with a sense of the good things. They both had marvelous taste.”
It was as if a sorcerer had made a list of everything Broyard loved and had given it life. At long last, the conqueror was conquered: in less than a year, Broyard and Sandy were married. Sandy remembers his aura in those days: “Anatole was very hip. It wasn’t a pose—it was in his sinew, in his bones. And, when he was talking to you, you just felt that you were receiving all this radiance from him.” (Van den Haag says, “I do think it’s not without significance that Anatole married a blonde, and about as white as you can get. He may have feared a little bit that the children might turn out black. He must have been pleased that they didn’t.”)
While they were still dating, two of Broyard’s friends told Sandy that he was black, in what seemed to be a clumsy attempt to scare her off. “I think they really weren’t happy to lose him, to see him get into a serious relationship,” she says. “They were losing a playmate, in a way.” Whatever the cultural sanctions, she was unfazed. But she says that when she asked Broyard about it he proved evasive: “He claimed that he wasn’t black, but he talked about ‘island influences,’ or said that he had a grandmother who used to live in a tree on some island in the Caribbean. Anatole was like that—he was very slippery.” Sandy didn’t force the issue, and the succeeding years only fortified his sense of reserve. “Anatole was very strong,” she says. “And he said about certain things, ‘Just keep out. This is the deal if you get mixed up with me.’” The life that Broyard chose to live meant that the children did not meet their Aunt Shirley until after his death—nor, except for a couple of brief visits in the sixties, was there any con
tact even with Broyard’s light-skinned mother and older sister. It was a matter of respecting the ground rules. “I would try to poke in those areas, but the message was very direct and strong,” Sandy explains. “Oh, when I got angry at him, you know, one always pushes the tender points. But over time you grow up about these things and realize you do what you can do and there are certain things you can’t.”
In 1963, just before their first child, Todd, was born, Anatole shocked his friends by another big move—to Connecticut. Not only was he moving to Connecticut but he was going to be commuting to work: for the first time in his life, he would be a company man. “I think one of his claims to fame was that he hadn’t had an office job—somehow, he’d escaped that,” Sandy says. “There had been no real need for him to grow up.” But after Todd was born—a daughter, Bliss, followed in 1966—Anatole spent seven years working full-time as a copywriter at the Manhattan advertising agency Wunderman Ricotta & Kline.
Over the next quarter century, the family lived in a series of eighteenth-century houses, sometimes bought on impulse, in places like Fairfield, Redding, Greens Farms, and Southport. Here, in a land of leaf-blowers and lawnmowers, Bed-Stuy must have seemed almost comically remote. Many of Broyard’s intimates from the late forties knew about his family; the intimates he acquired in the sixties did not, or else had heard only rumors. Each year, the number of people who knew Buddy from Bed-Stuy dwindled; each year, the rumors grew more nebulous; each year, he left his past further behind. Miller says, “Anatole was a master at what Erving Goffman calls ‘impression management.’” The writer Evelyn Toynton says, “I remember once going to a party with Sandy and him in Connecticut. There were these rather dull people there, stockbrokers and the usual sorts of people, and Anatole just knocked himself out to charm every single person in the room. I said to him, ‘Anatole, can’t you ever not be charming?’” Miller observes, “He was a wonderful host. He could take people from different walks of life—the president of Stanley Tools or a vice-president of Merrill Lynch, say, and some bohemian type from the Village—and keep the whole scene flowing beautifully. He had perfect pitch for the social encounter, like Jay Gatsby.”
It was as if, wedded to an ideal of American self-fashioning, he sought to put himself to the ultimate test. It was one thing to be accepted in the Village, amid the Beats and hipsters and émigrés, but to gain acceptance in Cheever territory was an achievement of a higher order. “Anatole, when he left the Village and went to Connecticut, was able not only to pass but even to be a kind of influential presence in that world of rich white Wasps,” Miller says. “Maybe that was a shallower part of the passing—to be accepted by Connecticut gentry.”
Broyard’s feat raised eyebrows among some of his literary admirers: something borrowed, something new. Daphne Merkin, another longtime friend, detected “a ‘country–squire’ tendency—a complicated tendency to want to establish a sort of safety through bourgeoisness. It was like a Galsworthy quality.”
Even in Arcadia, however, there could be no relaxation of vigilance: in his most intimate relationships, there were guardrails. Broyard once wrote that Michael Miller was one of the people he liked best in the world, and Miller is candid about Broyard’s profound influence on him. Today, Miller is a psycho-therapist, based in Cambridge, and the author, most recently, of “Intimate Terrorism.” From the time they met until his death, Broyard read to him the first draft of almost every piece he wrote. Yet a thirty-year friendship of unusual intimacy was circumscribed by a subject that they never discussed. “First of all, I didn’t know,” Miller says. “I just had intuitions and had heard intimations. It was some years before I’d even put together some intuition and little rumblings—nothing ever emerged clearly. There was a certain tacit understanding between us to accept certain pathways as our best selves, and not challenge that too much.” It was perhaps, he says a little sadly, a limitation on the relationship.
In the late sixties, Broyard wrote several front-page reviews for the Times Book Review. “They were brilliant, absolutely sensational,” the novelist Charles Simmons, who was then an assistant editor there, says. In 1971, the Times was casting about for a new daily reviewer, and Simmons was among those who suggested Anatole Broyard. It wasn’t a tough sell. Arthur Gelb, at the time the paper’s cultural editor, recalls, “Anatole was among the first critics I brought to the paper. He was very funny, and he also had that special knack for penetrating hypocrisy. I don’t think he was capable of uttering a boring sentence.”
You could say that his arrival was a sign of the times. Imagine: Anatole Broyard, downtown flaneur and apostle of sex and high modernism, ensconced in what was, literarily speaking, the ultimate establishment perch. “There had been an awful lot of very tame, very conventional people at the Times, and Broyard came in as a sort of ambassador from the Village and Village sophistication,” Alfred Kazin recalls. Broyard had a highly developed appreciation of the paper’s institutional power, and he even managed to use it to avenge wrongs done him in his Village days. Just before he started his job at the daily, he published a review in the Times Book Review of a new novel by one Chandler Brossard. The review began, “Here’s a book so transcendently bad it makes us fear not only for the condition of the novel in this country, but for the country itself.”
Broyard’s reviews were published in alternation with those of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who has now been a daily reviewer at the Times for more than a quarter century, and who readily admits that Broyard’s appointment did not gladden his heart. They hadn’t got along particularly well when Lehmann-Haupt was an editor at the Times Book Review, nor did Lehmann-Haupt entirely approve of Broyard’s status as a fabled libertine. So when A. M. Rosenthal, the paper’s managing editor, was considering hiring him, Lehmann-Haupt expressed reservations. He recalls, “Rosenthal was saying, ‘Give me five reasons why not.’ And I thoughtlessly blurted out, ‘Well, first of all, he is the biggest ass man in town.’ And Rosenthal rose up from his desk and said, ‘If that were a disqualification for working for the New York Times’—and he waved—‘this place would be empty!’”
Broyard got off to an impressive start. Lehmann-Haupt says, “He had a wonderful way of setting a tone, and a wonderful way of talking himself through a review. He had good, tough instincts when it came to fiction. He had taste.” And the jovial Herbert Mitgang, who served a stint as a daily reviewer himself, says, “I always thought he was the most literary of the reviewers. There would be something like a little essay in his daily reviews.”
Occasionally, his acerbic opinions got him in trouble. There was, for example, the storm that attended an uncharitable review of a novel by Christy Brown, an Irish writer who was born with severe cerebral palsy. The review concluded:
It is unfortunate that the author of “A Shadow on Summer” is an almost total spastic—he is said to have typed his highly regarded first novel, “Down All the Days,” with his left foot—but I don’t see how the badness of his second novel can be blamed on that. Any man who can learn to type with his left foot can learn to write better than he has here.
Then, there was the controversial review of James Baldwin’s piously sentimental novel of black suffering, “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Broyard wrote:
If I have to read one more description of the garbage piled up in the streets of Harlem, I may just throw protocol to the winds and ask whose garbage is it? I would like to remind Mr. Baldwin that the City Health Code stipulates that garbage must be put out in proper containers, not indiscriminately “piled.”
No one could accuse Broyard of proselytizing for progressive causes. Jason Epstein, for one, was quick to detect a neoconservative air in his reviews, and Broyard’s old friend Ernest van den Haag, a longtime contributing editor at National Review, volunteers that he was available to set Broyard straight on the issues when the need arose. Broyard could be mischievous, and he could be tendentious. It did not escape notice that he was consistently hostile to feminist writers. “Perhaps i
t’s naïve of me to expect people to write reasonable books about emotionally charged subjects,” one such review began, irritably. “But when you have to read and review two or three books each week, you do get tired of ‘understanding’ so much personal bias. You reach a point where it no longer matters that the author’s mistakes are well meant. You don’t care that he or she is on the side of the angels: you just want them to tell the truth.”
Nor did relations between the two daily reviewers ever become altogether cordial. Lehmann-Haupt tells of a time in 1974 when Broyard said that he was sick and couldn’t deliver a review. Lehmann-Haupt had to write an extra review in less than a day, so that he could get to the Ali-Frazier fight the next night, where he had ringside seats. Later, when they discussed the match, Broyard seemed suspiciously knowledgeable about its particulars; he claimed that a friend of his had been invited by a television executive to watch it on closed-circuit TV. “I waited about six months, because one of the charming things about Anatole was that he never remembered his lies,” Lehmann-Haupt says, laughing. “And I said, ‘Did you see that fight?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah—I was there as a guest of this television executive.’ That’s why he couldn’t write the review!”
Broyard had been teaching off and on at the New School since the late fifties, and now his reputation as a writing teacher began to soar. Certainly his fluent prose style, with its combination of grace and clarity, was a considerable recommendation. He was charismatic and magisterial, and, because he was sometimes brutal about students’ work, they found it all the more gratifying when he was complimentary. Among his students were Paul Breslow, Robert Olen Butler, Daphne Merkin, and Hilma Wolitzer. Ellen Schwamm, who took a workshop with him in the early seventies, says, “He had a gourmet’s taste for literature and for language, and he was really able to convey that: it was a very sensual experience.”
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 46