He told Delmore and his friends about visiting the Park Plaza, a club in Spanish Harlem where a man nicknamed Midnight, for the color of his skin, and another called Electrico, for the speed of his feet, engaged in acrobatic face-offs for the unofficial title of best dancer. At another club he watched a group of men stomp to death a stranger who had tried to gain free entry by wielding a knife. Afterward the men wiped the blood from their shoes with their handkerchiefs before returning to the dance floor. His stories whetted the intellectuals’ appetites. They wanted to see the primitive for themselves. My father suggested that they go to the Park Plaza that very evening; he hailed a cab and they headed uptown.
My father later wrote that although he admired the New York intellectuals for their talent for “high abstraction” and ability to “see life from a great height,” he also pitied them for losing touch with the “raw data of actuality.” Because they’d read themselves right out of American culture, these writers needed people like my father to show them around. But I’m surprised at my dad’s eagerness to play along. In his Partisan Review essay, he scorns the hipster for becoming the darling of the Village intellectuals, who hailed him as the “great instinctual man” and demanded that he interpret the world for them. My father notes that recognition by the literary establishment gave the Negro hipster real somewhereness at last and subsequently ruined him: “His old subversiveness, his ferocity, was now so manifestly rhetorical as to be obviously harmless....He let himself be bought and placed in the zoo.”
But how was my father’s willingness to pimp some Harlem primitive for Delmore and his friends any different? He even found them girls to dance with. Having cast himself as native tour guide, he looked upon the men’s inability to mix with the locals with the contempt of the colonized. Only Dwight Macdonald, “a permanent revolutionary,” seemed at home.
Yet my father persisted in acting as a bridge between the uptown (black) world and the (white intellectual) Village. He started to bring a group of disciples up to Spanish Harlem every Thursday night. He continued to write about the jazz world, Afro-Cuban music, and the sexuality of dancing—none of which were typical subject matter for the average white intellectual. (Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, a Jewish jazz clarinetist, was often described as passing for black after embracing the music and culture.) And my father didn’t shy away from “primitive” pastimes, even working out with George Brown, the boxing coach who was reputed to have trained Hemingway. While in hindsight it might seem that my father was exploiting his access to the black world for his own personal gain, I think he might have argued that he was simply being himself and wasn’t inclined to accommodate his interests to those of the white intellectuals around him.
As it was, most everyone in his circle already knew about his mixed-race ancestry. The writer Herbert Gold, who lived in Greenwich Village then, says that it was the first thing you heard about Anatole Broyard. (Gold, who has written many fiction and nonfiction works, described my dad as “his spade friend, Leroy” in his fictionalized memoir about those years, causing a rift in their friendship.) Neurotica editor Jay Landesman concurs: “Everyone knew Anatole was a Negro. He didn’t deny it in any way. He didn’t affirm it either.”
The novelist Anne Bernays dated my father in the early 1950s. She’d been forewarned by Milton Klonsky’s girlfriend, who introduced them, that Anatole was black although he looked white. After learning that Anne’s father, Edward Bernays (who is often described as the father of public relations), was handling the PR for the NAACP, my dad volunteered that his brother-in-law also worked for the organization. Otherwise he rarely mentioned his background. For Anne’s parents the fact that my father was “downtown” worried them as much as his racial identity. Not only might he give their daughter a black baby, but he wouldn’t be able to support her and the child either. Anne, however, was more concerned with reading all the books that my father gave her and coming up with intelligent things to say about them over dinner.
Of the ten women I spoke with who dated my father during the forties and fifties, all but one were aware of his racial identity—learning it either from someone else or from my father himself. Among my father’s correspondence, there is one terse note from a girl he’d recently dumped who reveals that she’d learned from a mutual friend that my dad was “partly colored.” She writes that she was sorry that my father didn’t trust her enough to tell her himself. But the rest of his old girlfriends, all of whom were white, insist that his racial identity made no difference to them.
Of course these women had styled themselves as rule breakers by moving to the Village and taking up with one of its more notorious denizens. Dating across the color line was just another way of bucking convention. But since my father neither looked nor identified as black, there wasn’t much risk of public censure. The women could be daring and modern without being truly radical. Even in this bohemian haven, interracial couples still attracted the ire of passersby on the street. In public, blacks and whites kept mostly to themselves.
On many nights the writer James Baldwin and the artist Beauford Delaney, both African American, could be found at their own booth at the San Remo. And they might have been joined on occasion by Delaney’s good friend W. F. Lucas, also black, who happened to have grown up with my dad in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I doubt that my father would have ignored Lucas—other black friends from the neighborhood say he was friendly when they bumped into him at jazz clubs—but Lucas, who eventually became a scholar and dramatist, later sniped that my dad was black when he entered the subway in Brooklyn and white when he got out at West Fourth Street in Manhattan.
The conversation at the Baldwin booth wasn’t so different from that at my father’s table—also revolving around modernism, the avant-garde, and aesthetics. But these men (and occasionally women) had to deal with the additional burden and responsibility of being seen as “black artists,” even as they weren’t sure what that label was supposed to mean. Baldwin’s biographer, David Leeming, recounts how the young writer struggled with this problem early in his career: “The question of his identity obsessed him. What was a homosexual? What was a Negro? Was it necessary to live by these ‘presumptuous labels’?”
On a visit to a writer’s colony during the summer of 1948, Baldwin wrote in his journal about his desire to conceive of himself, in Walt Whitman’s formulation, as “containing all roles, classes, ethnic groups, and orientations.” He also realized that he must accept his condition in order to be “free,” inspired perhaps by Sartre’s recent essay in Commentary on the Jew’s need to accept his irreducible difference in the eyes of non-Jews in order to live authentically in the world. Having shelved his identity crisis for the time being, Baldwin wrote in one night “Previous Condition,” his first published work of fiction.
Published in Commentary in October of 1948, the story concerns a young black man who is evicted from his Village apartment because of his race. To his well-meaning white (Jewish) friend who had secretly rented him the apartment, the narrator says, “I know everybody’s in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don’t understand it and don’t want to and spend all my time trying to forget it?” A month after publication, Baldwin left for Paris, where he would be better able to forget his blackness. Delaney, who also had to contend with being labeled a “Negro artist,” no matter his affinity with the Abstract Expressionists, followed his friend to France five years later.
From Baldwin and Delaney’s vantage point, my dad, laughing at the next booth with Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald, had his identity all figured out. He was passing as white, end of story. This observation wasn’t made with particular judgment, but it did make being friends with Anatole difficult. On the other hand, two African American writers who were friendly with my father, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, didn’t view him as dodging black people or black culture. Murray recalls the time he and Ellison spotted Anatole at a party: “He had this blond chick all bent over
doing the one-butt shuffle. Anybody could see that he wasn’t denying identification with that particular style, lifestyle, outlook, and whatnot.” Murray says that neither he nor Ellison saw any need for my father to declare himself one way or another.
Yet the question of what he was did weigh on my father’s mind. The focus of his writing and his intellectual inquiries during the late 1940s and early 1950s suggests a preoccupation with black identity in general and his own identity specifically. My father had always been very deliberate in how he presented himself to the world, fastidious in his appearance, careful in his manner of speech, nearly abstemious because he didn’t like to lose control. His relationship to his racial identity would be no less carefully fashioned, resting upon a sound philosophical base.
At the New School, he took course after course in psychology: “Approach to Personality,” “Psychology of Adjustment,” “Toward Knowing Oneself,” and even a semester on the Rorschach method. At age twenty-six my father entered into the first of many analyses that he would undertake over the next forty years. And in his writing, he returned to the examination of social type that he’d begun in his hipster piece, placing next under his lens the Anglo-Saxon, whom he satirized as “so perfectly in harmony with things as they are that when he isn’t laughing his face is expressionless.” Sartre’s essay “Portrait of an Inauthentic Jew” in the May 1948 issue of Commentary provided my father with the necessary framework to explore his ideas about blackness, and he began to work on a similar analysis of Negro inauthenticity.
In Sartre’s formulation, “authenticity for [the Jew] is to live to the full his condition as Jew; inauthenticity is to deny it or to attempt to escape from it.” In other words, a Jewish person had to accept the reality that others saw him as a Jew, with all the prejudices and mythologies that went along with that identification, before he could truly be himself. The alternative, according to Sartre, was pursuing “avenues of flight” that made the Jew complicit with anti-Semitic stereotypes. For example, the Jew’s reputation as excessively self-analytical, particularly among the intellectual class, was not, in Sartre’s opinion, an inherited tendency but an avenue of flight. Other examples were feelings of inferiority, acute anxiety, Jewish anti-Semitism, and altruism (in reaction to the Jew’s supposed money hungering). By recognizing the prejudice that defines his relation to the world, opined Sartre, the Jew can begin to short-circuit his defensive reactions.
In his article “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” which appeared in Commentary in July 1950, my father also identified various avenues of flight: there was “minstrelization,” symbolized by the grinning Negro who seemingly acquiesced to his minority status; “romanticization,” represented by “Negro artists” and others who made a career out of being society’s scapegoat and martyr; the “rejected attitude,” wherein refusal of the Negro’s supposed gaiety and spontaneity resulted in an exaggerated aloofness; and “bestialization,” in which Negroes exploited their reputation as more primitive and sexualized beings. In his recommended cure, however, my father parted ways with Sartre’s model. For the Negro he prescribed a “stubborn adherence to one’s essential self, in spite of the distorting pressures of one’s situation.” By essential self, my father meant “[the Negro’s] innate qualities and developed characteristics as an individual, as distinguished from his preponderantly defensive reactions as a member of an embattled minority.”
Unlike Sartre, he saw no benefit in the minority person’s recognizing that the rest of the world viewed him as irreconcilably different. In fact my father suggested that Negroes could best “authenticate themselves” by proving that they were “fundamentally ‘different’ [from whites] only in appearance.” My father conceded that while the physical fact of blackness could still strike terror into the hearts of white people, especially the prospect of having a “black baby,” he counseled: “The falsity of such physiognomic discrimination becomes immediately apparent when we realize that thousands of Negroes with ‘typical’ features are accepted as whites merely because of light complexion.”
It’s impossible not to read this essay as my father’s attempt to justify the way he was living his life. After all, he could hardly be accused of passing after publishing in one of his crowd’s most widely read magazines a piece that demonstrated his intimate knowledge of the American Negro—a situation, his author biography observed, “which he knows at first hand.” But the essay is more than a blanket apologia. My father truly believed that there wasn’t any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for determining who he was supposed to be was himself.
For much of my childhood, a copy of the July 1950 issue of Commentary magazine sat within arm’s reach of our dinner table, but I didn’t pull it out and read “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro” until a few years after my father died. When I finished I remembered what he’d said when I first learned about the existence of a secret on Martha’s Vineyard: If you want to know me, then why don’t you read more of my writing? Perhaps he’d been thinking of this essay. Yet if I had opened the magazine while he was still alive, I would have been left with more questions, such as why there was a neatly razored hole on the bottom left-hand corner of the first page, where the contributor’s note describing his firsthand knowledge of the American Negro should have been. Apparently his view of black identity was acceptable to share, but the editors’ view on his black identity was not. Once again here was my father picking and choosing about how he would be presented to the world. Here he was hiding in plain sight. I don’t know whether to feel thankful or regretful that I never stumbled on his secret while he was alive.
Few among his Greenwich Village friends seem to have read the “Inauthentic Negro” piece. At least they couldn’t remember it years later, although they recalled other essays my father published during this period. This is particularly curious given the popularity of Sartre and existentialism at that time. It was no small thing for a young, relatively unknown writer to take on the venerable French philosopher. Considering that my dad was addressing the subject of black identity, after all the intrigue about his own background, it’s even more surprising that so little attention was paid to the essay’s publication.
Perhaps “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro” wasn’t memorable because it wasn’t particularly good. Despite his supposed intimate knowledge, my father dismissed the everyday realities of black people’s lives without a backward glance. It was easy for him to suggest that African Americans forget they are Negroes—the world didn’t throw that identification in his face again and again. It was easy for him to recommend that blacks resist the distorting effects of white prejudice—he wasn’t bombarded by it every day.
At a moment in American history when blacks were having trouble finding work and gaining admission to restaurants and clubs, where any good or bad thing they did was chalked up as a credit or embarrassment to their race, when the possibility of being seen with a white woman or getting lost in a white neighborhood could lead to spurious—and life-threatening—conclusions, my father’s prescription of a “stubborn adherence to one’s essential self” was, at best, very weak medicine. Try telling that to his brother-in-law Frank, who the year before had been chased by the Ku Klux Klan after leaving a Florida courthouse, where he’d been consulting on the trial of three black men accused of raping a white woman. After two hours at high speeds, his driver, who was a local African American man, managed to shake their pursuers in a black ghetto in Orlando. Two of the defendants weren’t so lucky: while the sheriff was transferring them to another jail, they allegedly tried to escape and were shot to death.
No matter how many classes my father had taken with the Freudian revisionist Erich Fromm, whose focus was the role of society in shaping the individual, no matter how closely he studied Freud’s thesis in Civilization and Its Discontents about the tension between a man’s freedom and the conformity imposed by civilization, my father still couldn’t see how the hand of the world
pushed upon the Negro’s back and how that pressure might make a person want to push back. Yet when someone pinned my father’s race on him—“Look, a Negro!” in the formulation of Martinican writer Frantz Fanon in his essay “The Fact of Blackness,” published in 1952, also in response to Sartre’s analysis of Jewish identity—my dad wasn’t able to turn the other cheek either.
Around the same time that my father was analyzing inauthentic Negroes, his pal Chandler Brossard was writing his roman à clef about the 1940s Greenwich Village scene. My father was under the impression that he was Brossard’s closest friend; after all, he’d served as best man at his wedding a few years earlier. So it must have come as a surprise when word got back to my father that he was the model for the protagonist in Brossard’s novel—a smooth-talking hustler named Henry Porter. And that surprise must have turned to hurt and anger when he received a copy of the manuscript from Brossard’s publishers, who wanted him to sign a release before publication. The novel’s opening paragraph read:
People said Henry Porter was a “passed” Negro. But nobody knew for sure. I think the rumor was started by someone who had grown up with Porter in San Francisco. He did not look part Negro to me. Latin, yes. Anyway, the rumor followed him around. I suspect it 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.
My father refused to sign the release, and Brossard was forced to change identifying details. In the version that was published, Henry Porter is instead illegitimate, which didn’t carry nearly the same stigma as blackness. Needless to say, the men’s friendship was over. (Twenty years later my father would nearly sabotage his new position as the daily book critic for the New York Times in the process of settling the score.)
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