These were years of heady success and, at the same time, of a rising sense of failure. An arbiter of American writing, Broyard was racked by his inability to write his own magnum opus. In the fifties, the Atlantic Monthly Press had contracted for an autobiographical novel—the novel that was supposed to secure Broyard’s fame, his place in contemporary literature—but, all these years later, he had made no progress. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Lehmann-Haupt recalls his taking a lengthy vacation in order to get the book written. “I remember talking to him—he was up in Vermont, where somebody had lent him a house—and he was in agony. He banished himself from the Vineyard, was clearly suffering, and he just couldn’t do it.” John Updike, who knew Broyard slightly from the Vineyard, was reminded of the anticipation surrounding Ellison’s second novel: “The most famous non-book around was the one that Broyard was not writing.” (The two non-book writers were in fact quite friendly: Broyard admired Ellison not only as a writer but as a dancer—a high tribute from such an adept as Broyard.)
Surrounded by analysts and psychotherapists—Sandy Broyard had become a therapist herself by this time—Broyard had no shortage of explanations for his inability to write his book. “He did have a total writer’s block,” van den Haag says, “and he was analyzed by various persons, but it didn’t fully overcome the writer’s block. I couldn’t prevent him from going back to ‘The Cystoscope’ and trying to improve it. He made it, of course, not better but worse.” Broyard’s fluency as an essayist and a reviewer wasn’t quite compensation. Charles Simmons says, “He had produced all this charming criticism, but the one thing that mattered to him was the one thing he hadn’t managed to do.”
As the seventies wore on, Miller discussed the matter of blockage with his best friend in relatively abstract terms: he suggested that there might be something in Broyard’s relationship to his family background that was holding him back. In the eighties, he referred Broyard to his own chief mentor in gestalt therapy, Isador From, and From became perhaps Broyard’s most important therapist in his later years. “In gestalt therapy, we talk a lot about ‘unfinished business’: anything that’s incomplete, unfinished, haunts the whole personality and tends, at some level, to create inhibition or blockage,” Miller says. “You’re stuck there at a certain point. It’s like living with a partly full bladder all your life.”
Some people speculated that the reason Broyard couldn’t write his novel was that he was living it—that race loomed larger in his life because it was unacknowledged, that he couldn’t put it behind him because he had put it beneath him. If he had been a different sort of writer, it might not have mattered so much. But Merkin points out, “Anatole’s subject, even in fiction, was essentially himself. I think that ultimately he would have had to deal with more than he wanted to deal with.”
Broyard may have been the picture of serene self-mastery, but there was one subject that could reliably fluster him. Gordon Lish recalls an occasion in the mid-seventies when Burt Britton (who was married to a black woman) alluded to Anatole’s racial ancestry. Lish says, “Anatole became inflamed, and he left the room. He snapped, like a dog snapping—he barked at Britton. It was an ugly moment.” To people who knew nothing about the matter, Broyard’s sensitivities were at times simply perplexing. The critic Judith Dunford used to go to lunch with Broyard in the eighties. One day, Broyard mentioned his sister Shirley, and Dunford, idly making conversation, asked him what she looked like. Suddenly, she saw an extremely worried expression on his face. Very carefully, he replied, “Darker than me.”
There was, finally, no sanctuary. “When the children were older, I began, every eighteen months or so, to bring up the issue of how they needed to know at some point,” Sandy Broyard says. “And then he would totally shut down and go into a rage. He’d say that at some point he would tell them, but he would not tell them now.” He was the Scheherazade of racial imposture, seeking and securing one deferral after another. It must have made things not easier but harder. In the modern era, children are supposed to come out to their parents: it works better that way around. For children, we know, can judge their parents harshly—above all, for what they understand as failures of candor. His children would see the world in terms of authenticity; he saw the world in terms of self-creation. Would they think that he had made a Faustian bargain? Would they speculate about what else he had not told them—about the limits of self-invention? Broyard’s resistance is not hard to fathom. He must have wondered when the past would learn its place, and stay past.
Anatole Broyard had confessed enough in his time to know that confession did nothing for the soul. He preferred to communicate his truths on higher frequencies. As if in exorcism, Broyard’s personal essays deal regularly with the necessary, guilt-ridden endeavor of escaping family history: and yet the feelings involved are well-nigh universal. The thematic elements of passing—fragmentation, alienation, liminality, self-fashioning—echo the great themes of modernism. As a result, he could prepare the way for exposure without ever risking it. Miller observes, “If you look at the writing closely enough, and listen to the intonations, there’s something there that is like no writer from the completely white world. Freud talked about the repetition compulsion. With Anatole, it’s interesting that he was constantly hiding it and in some ways constantly revealing it.”
Sandy speaks of these matters in calmly analytic tones; perhaps because she is a therapist, her love is tempered by an almost professional dispassion. She says, “I think his own personal history continued to be painful to him,” and she adds, “In passing, you cause your family great anguish, but I also think, conversely, do we look at the anguish it causes the person who is passing? Or the anguish that it was born out of?”
It may be tempting to describe Broyard’s self-positioning as arising from a tortured allegiance to some liberal-humanist creed. In fact, the liberal pieties of the day were not much to his taste. “It wasn’t about an ideal of racelessness but something much more complex and interesting,” Miller says. “He was actually quite anti-black,” Evelyn Toynton says. She tells of a time when she was walking with him on a street in New York and a drunken black man came up to him and asked for a dollar. Broyard seethed. Afterward, he remarked to her, “I look around New York, and I think to myself, If there were no blacks in New York, would it really be any loss?”
No doubt this is a calculation that whites, even white liberals, sometimes find themselves idly working out: How many black muggers is one Thelonious Monk worth? How many Willie Hortons does Gwendolyn Brooks redeem? In 1970, Ellison published his classic essay “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” in Time; and one reason it is a classic essay is that it addresses a question that lingers in the American political unconscious. Commanding as Ellison’s arguments are, there remains a whit of defensiveness in the very exercise. It’s a burdensome thing to refute a fantasy.
And a burdensome thing to be privy to it. Ellen Schwamm recalls that one of the houses Broyard had in Connecticut had a black jockey on the lawn, and that “he used to tell me that Jimmy Baldwin had said to him, ‘I can’t come and see you with this crap on your lawn.’” (Sandy remembers the lawn jockey—an antique—as having come with the house; she also recalls that it was stolen one day.) Charles Simmons says that the writer Herbert Gold, before introducing him to Broyard, warned him that Broyard was prone to make comments about “spades,” and Broyard did make a few such comments. “He personally, on a deeper level, was not enamored of blacks,” van den Haag says. “He avoided blacks. There is no question he did.” Sandy is gingerly in alluding to this subject. “He was very short-tempered with the behavior of black people, the sort of behavior that was shown in the news. He had paid the price to be at liberty to say things that, if you didn’t know he was black, you would misunderstand. I think it made him ironical.”
Every once in a while, however, Broyard’s irony would slacken, and he would speak of the thing with an unaccustomed and halting forthrightness. Toynton says that af
ter they’d known each other for several years he told her there was a “C” (actually, “col,” for “colored”) on his birth certificate. “And then another time he told me that his sister was black and that she was married to a black man.” The circumlocutions are striking: not that he was black but that his birth certificate was; not that he was black but that his family was. Perhaps this was a matter less of evasiveness than of precision.
“Some shrink had said to him that the reason he didn’t like brown-haired women or dark women was that he was afraid of his own shit,” Toynton continues. “And I said, ‘Anatole, it’s as plain as plain can be that it has to do with being black.’ And he just stopped and said, ‘You don’t know what it was like. It was horrible.’ He told me once that he didn’t like to see his sisters, because they reminded him of his unhappy childhood.” (Shirley’s account suggests that this unhappy childhood may have had more to do with the child than with the hood.)
Ellen Schwamm remembers one occasion when Broyard visited her and Harold Brodkey at their apartment, and read them part of the memoir he was working on. She says that the passages seemed stilted and distant, and that Brodkey said to him, “You’re not telling the truth, and if you try to write lies or evade the truth this is what you get. What’s the real story?” She says, “Anatole took a deep breath and said, ‘The real story is that I’m not who I seem. I’m a black.’ I said, ‘Well, Anatole, it’s no great shock, because this rumor has been around for years and years and years, and everyone assumes there’s a small percentage of you that’s black, if that’s what you’re trying to say.’ And he said, ‘No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. My father could pass, but in fact my mother’s black, too. We’re black as far back as I know.’ We never said a word of it to anybody, because he asked us not to.”
Schwamm also says that she begged him to write about his history: it seemed to her excellent material for a book. But he explained that he didn’t want notoriety based on his race—on his revealing himself to be black—rather than on his talent. As Toynton puts it, Broyard felt that he had to make a choice between being an aesthete and being a Negro. “He felt that once he said, ‘I’m a Negro writer,’ he would have to write about black issues, and Anatole was such an aesthete.”
All the same, Schwamm was impressed by a paradox: the man wanted to be appreciated not for being black but for being a writer, even though his pretending not to be black was stopping him from writing. It was one of the very few ironies that Broyard, the master ironist, was ill equipped to appreciate.
Besides, there was always his day job to attend to. Broyard might suffer through a midnight of the soul in Vermont; but he was also a working journalist, and when it came to filing his copy he nearly always met his deadlines. In the late seventies, he also began publishing brief personal essays in the Times. They are among the finest work he did—easeful, witty, perfectly poised between surface and depth. In them he perfected the feat of being self-revelatory without revealing anything. He wrote about his current life, in Connecticut: “People in New York City have psychotherapists, and people in the suburbs have handymen. While anxiety in the city is existential, in the country it is structural.” And he wrote about his earlier life, in the city: “There was a kind of jazz in my father’s movements, a rhythm compounded of economy and flourishes, functional and decorative. He had a blues song in his blood, a wistful jauntiness he brought with him from New Orleans.” (Wistful, and even worrisome: “I half-expected him to break into the Camel Walk, the Shimmy Shewobble, the Black Bottom or the Mess Around.”) In a 1979 essay he wrote about how much he dreaded family excursions:
To me, they were like a suicide pact. Didn’t my parents know that the world was just waiting for a chance to come between us?
Inside, we were a family, but outside we were immigrants, bizarre in our differences. I thought that people stared at us, and my face grew hot. At any moment, I expected my father and mother to expose their tribal rites, their eccentric anthropology, to the gape of strangers.
Anyone who saw me with my family knew too much about me.
These were the themes he returned to in many of his personal essays, seemingly marking out the threshold he would not cross. And if some of his colleagues at the Times knew too much about him, or had heard the rumors, they wouldn’t have dreamed of saying anything. Abe Rosenthal (who did know about him) says that the subject never arose. “What was there to talk about? I didn’t really consider it my business. I didn’t think it was proper or polite, nor did I want him to think I was prejudiced, or anything.”
But most people knew nothing about it. C. Gerald Fraser, a reporter and an editor at the Times from 1967 until 1991, was friendly with Broyard’s brother-in-law Ambassador Franklin Williams. Fraser, who is black, recalls that one day Williams asked him how many black journalists there were at the Times. “I listed them,” he says, “and he said, ‘You forgot one.’ I went over the list again, and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Shirley’s brother, Anatole Broyard.’ I was dumbstruck, because I’d never heard it mentioned at the Times that he was black, or that the paper had a black critic.”
In any event, Broyard’s colleagues did not have to know what he was to have reservations about who he was. He cultivated his image as a trickster—someone who would bend the rules, finesse the system—and that image only intensified his detractors’ ire. “A good book review is an act of seduction, and when he did it there was nobody better,” John Leonard says, but he feels that Broyard’s best was not always offered. “I considered him to be one of the laziest book reviewers to come down the pike.” Soon a running joke was that Broyard would review only novels shorter than two hundred pages. In the introduction to “Aroused by Books,” a collection of the reviews he published in the early seventies, Broyard wrote that he tried to choose books for review that were “closest to [his] feelings.” Lehmann-Haupt says dryly, “We began to suspect that he often picked the books according to the attractiveness of the young female novelists who had written them.” Rosenthal had shamed him for voicing his disquiet about Broyard’s reputation as a Don Juan, but before long Rosenthal himself changed his tune. “Maybe five or six years later,” Lehmann-Haupt recalls, “Rosenthal comes up to me, jabbing me in the chest with a stiffened index finger and saying, ‘The trouble with Broyard is that he writes with his cock!’ I bit my tongue.”
Gradually, a measure of discontent with Broyard’s reviews began to make itself felt among the paper’s cultural commissars. Harvey Shapiro, the editor of the Book Review from 1975 to 1983, recalls conversations with Rosenthal in which “he would tell me that all his friends hated Anatole’s essays, and I would tell him that all my friends loved Anatole’s essays, and that would be the end of the conversation.” In 1984, Broyard was removed from the daily Times and given a column in the Book Review.
Mitchel Levitas, the editor of the Book Review from 1983 to 1989, edited Broyard’s column himself. He says, “It was a tough time for him, you see, because he had come off the daily book review, where he was out there in the public eye twice a week. That was a major change in his public role.” In addition to writing his column, he was put to work as an editor at the Book Review. The office environment was perhaps not altogether congenial to a man of his temperament. Kazin recalls, “He complained to me constantly about being on the Book Review, because he had to check people’s quotations and such. I think he thought that he was superior to the job.”
Then, too, it was an era in which the very notion of passing was beginning to seem less plangent than preposterous. Certainly Broyard’s skittishness around the subject wasn’t to everyone’s liking. Brent Staples, who is black, was an editor at the Book Review at the time Broyard was there. “Anatole had it both ways,” Staples says. “He would give you a kind of burlesque wink that seemed to indicate he was ready to accept the fact of your knowing that he was a black person. It was a real ambiguity, tacit and sort of recessed. He jived around and played with it a lot, but never made
it express the fact that he was black.” It was a game that tried Staples’ patience. “When Anatole came anywhere near me, for example, his whole style, demeanor, and tone would change,” he recalls. “I took that as him conveying to me, ‘Yes, I am like you. But I’m relating this to you on a kind of recondite channel.’ Over all, it made me angry. Here was a guy who was, for a long period of time, probably one of the two or three most important critical voices on literature in the United States. How could you, actively or passively, have this fact hidden?”
Staples pauses, then says, “You know, he turned it into a joke. And when you change something basic about yourself into a joke, it spreads, it metastasizes, and so his whole presentation of self became completely ironic. Everything about him was ironic.”
There were some people who came to have a professional interest in achieving a measure of clarity on the topic. Not long before Broyard retired from the Times, in 1989, Daphne Merkin, as an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, gave him an advance of a hundred thousand dollars for his memoirs. (The completed portion was ultimately published, as “Kafka Was the Rage,” by Crown.) Merkin learned that “he was, in some ways, opaque to himself,” and her disquiet grew when the early chapters arrived. “I said, ‘Anatole, there’s something odd here. Within the memoir, you have your family moving to a black neighborhood in Brooklyn. I find that strange—unless they’re black.’ I said, ‘You can do many things if you’re writing a memoir. But if you squelch stuff that seems to be crucial about you, and pretend it doesn’t exist.’ . . .” She observes that he was much attached to aspects of his childhood, but “in a clouded way.”
When Broyard retired from the Times, he was nearly sixty-nine. To Sandy, it was a source of some anguish that their children still did not know the truth about him. Yet what was that truth? Broyard was a critic—a critic who specialized in European and American fiction. And what was race but a European and American fiction? If he was passing for white, perhaps he understood that the alternative was passing for black. “But if some people are light enough to live like white, mother, why should there be such a fuss?” a girl asks her mother in “Near-White,” a 1931 story by the Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay. “Why should they live colored when they could be happier living white?” Why, indeed? One could concede that the passing of Anatole Broyard involved dishonesty; but is it so very clear that the dishonesty was mostly Broyard’s?
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 47