After Todd was born, Greenwich Hospital wouldn’t release him until my parents paid the bill—$500, which they didn’t have. My dad’s advance for the novel was long gone, and my mother had been swindled by a dishonest uncle out of her inheritance from her grandmother. What little she could access from her father’s estate had been used for the down payment on the house. If my mother asked her siblings for the money, it would only confirm their suspicions about my father’s inability to provide for their little sister. My dad called a friend from the Village, Albie, who was a jewel thief and always seemed to have a lot of cash on hand. When telling this story later, my father would portray Albie as a Robin Hood figure: he took from the rich and gave to the poor. That was us, the poor, living in the big house with the pool and the tennis court.
After bailing out my mother and brother, my father took the train back into the city and got his first full-time job, as a copywriter for a New York advertising agency. To the shock of his old friends, he stayed for seven years, working on accounts of Time-Life Books and Columbia Record Club. Anatole, the consummate Village bohemian, had become a company man, a daily commuter! But as the pal of his novel’s narrator said, “Your life is there and you live it.” Which didn’t leave much time for anything else.
During my father’s first year in Connecticut, away from the diversions of the city, he managed to produce more writing than he had in years. Living an ordinary life could be fruitful. He published a story in Playboy and another one in the New Yorker, and wrote a handful of new chapters for the novel. But that period of productivity soon ended, and my father found that he had traded in one set of distractions for another.
During the summer months, he convinced Tim Horan, his boss at the ad agency, who’d read his fiction back in the fifties and was as anxious for the novel as everyone else, to give him an extra ten days of vacation. “He’d always say that was all he needed, a few more weeks,” Tim remembers. “Then he’d come back and say, ‘Well, I got it pretty well finished. I’ll certainly finish it by next spring.’”
In fact he wasn’t making any progress at all. Going by the dates on his notebooks and drafts of stories, he seems to have ground to a halt not long after he started at the advertising agency. The sustained concentration required to produce literary fiction wasn’t easy to come by for a man with a full-time job, two children, and a house in need of constant repairs—and those weren’t my father’s only problems.
Bob Pack, my parents’ neighbor, says: “At that time, there were two fictions that were a part of your dad’s psychology. One was that he was working on the novel and was going to finish it. The other was the fiction of his white origins.” About the book, Bob, like Mike Miller, guessed that my father had set his standards to a paralyzing height. About my father’s background, Bob says: “The assumption that I made, and everyone else I knew made, was that people are entitled to see themselves the way that they want to. They have the right to make public what they want to make public, and keep private what they want to keep private.” Bob adds that for my father’s friends, his racial identity didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
But it did make a difference for my dad when it came to writing an autobiographical novel with a coming-of-age theme that centered on his relationship with his father. “He didn’t use the word ‘blocked,’ but it was a very painful business,” Miller says. Although Mike never talked directly with my dad about his background, he sensed that unresolved issues concerning my father’s identity were preventing him from gaining the required perspective for his theme.
It was only in my father’s conversation that Mike saw all the aspects of his background coming together: his vast knowledge of European and American literature and his ironic—normally Jewish—take on the world, combined with the raw earthiness of funk and the graceful improvisation of jazz. “If he could have turned this loose in his fiction, it would have been marvelous,” Mike says. “He would have synthesized the best elements of American culture.” But my dad was never able to write with the spontaneous elegance that was in his speech. Something kept making him tongue-tied whenever he faced the blank page.
That my father should feel compelled to make the subject of his novel the one subject in his life that he couldn’t address was the kind of irony that he appreciated. He greatly admired, for example, the idea at the center of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents: since our human nature makes us want to have sex with everything in sight, all civilizations, in order to prevent themselves from falling into anarchy, must incorporate repressive rules about who a person can and can’t be intimate with. Such tensions demonstrated human beings’ selfish and selfless extremes. But while theoretically fascinating, living within an irresolvable contradiction could wear a person out.
Just as domestic life hadn’t loosened my father’s writing block, neither did it solve my mother’s problems. Her insomnia and anxiety only increased after the wedding. At my father’s suggestion, she entered analysis, a style of therapy that is now understood to be the worst possible treatment for post-traumatic stress syndrome. After suffering a breakdown in the analyst’s office, she only escaped hospitalization through the intervention of a progressive psychiatrist who put her on one of the first-ever antidepressant medications. But in the meantime she’d stumbled on a powerful elixir of her own—bourbon and sleeping pills—that could lift her out of her pain, and consciousness, for stretches at a time. Having babies and fixing up houses kept her distracted for a while, but after a few years in Connecticut, the old nightmares reemerged, and my mother began knocking herself out more and more frequently.
A wife who spent her days wrapped in an old blue bathrobe on the couch in the den, alternately crying or drinking some more until she passed out again, was a Cheeveresque aspect of exurban life that my father hadn’t anticipated. Beyond driving around to the local liquor stores and asking them to please not sell alcohol to his wife, he was at a loss about what to do. Just as he’d tried to avoid the problems of the city by heading to the country, he escaped his troubles in Connecticut by fleeing back to Manhattan, where he took refuge many nights at a pied-à-terre that he rented with a friend. No doubt the women in whose arms my father had always distracted and reified himself offered an additional palliative.
And so while my father may have succeeded in rescuing us from the pain of his childhood, we were left to deal with the pain of our own childhoods by ourselves. It wasn’t until a few years after my mother quit drinking, with the help of some therapists who specialized in trauma, that my dad recognized his misguided belief in the protective powers of the good life. In an essay he wrote in the late seventies for the Times, he wondered if being raised in the country was any better than a city upbringing. The wounds in exurban life “are too exclusive, too internal, too often originating in the family.” Perhaps it would have been healthier for us to have been hurt by the outside world instead.
Yet my parents kept on buying and selling houses in Fairfield County, as if the solution was simply a matter of finding the right environment. And actually the strategy sort of worked. With each new location, they allowed themselves a fresh start; as if struck over and over again by sudden amnesia, they continued to believe in the possibility of happiness. Finally, in 1976, shortly after my mother became sober, my parents moved to the last of their eighteenth-century farmhouses, where we would stay put for the rest of my childhood.
My father had also changed jobs, which helped matters. Since moving to Connecticut, the one kind of writing he’d been able to produce quite successfully was literary criticism. A couple of page-one reviews he wrote for the Times Book Review brought him to the attention of the paper’s cultural editor, Arthur Gelb, when a position for a daily book critic opened up in the winter of 1971. The job was arguably one of the most influential in publishing. Two to three times a week, the daily reviewer’s column could make or break an author’s career. Landing it meant that my father could spend his days doing what he liked best: reading books an
d thinking about writing. But he nearly took himself out of the running in his eagerness to settle an old score.
A few months earlier, my dad had gotten word that his ex-friend Chandler Brossard had a new novel coming out. Over lunch one day with Tim Horan from the ad agency, my father mentioned that he was thinking of offering to review the book for the Times Book Review. Wouldn’t it be nice if Chandler finally had a hit, my dad had said, which Tim found curious, since he’d heard the story about how the passing Negro in Brossard’s first novel was based on my father. In any case, my father submitted the review long before the book critic position was even on the horizon, though the piece hadn’t yet been published when he learned that he’d gotten the job.
According to Gelb, the competition had come down to my father, the critic Alfred Kazin, and the Irish writer Wilfred Sheed. Neither Kazin nor Sheed particularly wanted it, and my father did. He was also seen as someone who could lend a bit of hipness to the paper’s rather staid image. Kazin later likened my father’s arrival in the Times’s offices to that of an ambassador for Greenwich Village sophistication. After his seven years of commuting back and forth from Connecticut to the advertising agency, it was a role my father was delighted to reprise.
His appointment was announced in the paper on a Monday. The following Sunday his Brossard review finally ran. It 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.” Within weeks articles appeared in the Village Voice and the Boston Globe denouncing my father for using the Gray Lady as his bully pulpit. The Book Review was forced to devote an entire letters section to the ensuing firestorm: Brossard’s charge, my father’s countercharges, and a chorus of bystanders weighing in. Tim Horan, then in frequent contact with Times editors regarding a business deal, heard talk that Broyard might be fired.
Again and again the history of the feud was laid out in print, except for one crucial detail: exactly what my father had found so offensive about Brossard’s characterization of him. In person, however, Anatole Broyard’s racial background became fodder for speculation once more. In the Village Voice, the columnist Nat Hentoff had included the first line of the French translation of Brossard’s novel, which had been published in the original version: Le bruit courait qu’Henry Porter avait du sang negre. Among my parents’ neighbors in Connecticut, some of whom were Voice subscribers, were people who caught the reference to black blood. Irving Sabo, who lived next door, recalls the article being the topic of conversation for a period.
Could my father really have believed that Brossard would remain silent? The recklessness of his behavior suggests that he was too blinded by his desire for revenge to think through the possible consequences, or else he didn’t feel that he had anything to hide. What’s very clear is his determination to defend his right to be the sole arbiter of his own identity at any cost.
If his new bosses hadn’t heard the rumors about Broyard before, they had now. My father managed to quiet the brouhaha with his assured dismissal of Brossard’s charges in the letters section of the Book Review. However, some of his collegues noted a trickster tendency about the new critic, which they never completely forgot.
The culture editor, Arthur Gelb, who was responsible for actually hiring my father, maintains that he had always known about his racial identity, while Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor at the time, told me a few months before he died that he only learned after my father joined the paper. Years later, both men took the position that it didn’t much matter to them and that they even felt sympathetic to my father’s situation. Gelb remembered discussing it with my dad in relation to a book that Gelb was working on about self-hating Jews, while Rosenthal said that he was delighted to learn about the “addition of his background,” but the idea that my father had to declare himself as white or black was ridiculous. Still, given the climate at the Times, it was easier for my father’s bosses if he let people go on assuming he was white.
Mel Watkins—the first African American editor in the Sunday section, which included the Book Review, Arts and Leisure, and the magazine—explains that it would have been difficult for the higher-ups to acknowledge having hired a black reviewer in the early seventies because of “an abiding assumption in America at the time that blacks were not capable of the kind of objective analysis that was necessary to be a critic.” Watkins, who worked as an editor at the Book Review between 1965 and 1985, had actually been told that by a senior editor at the paper.
During his tenure Watkins made an effort to suggest black reviewers for books by white writers to correct what appeared to him to be a major inequity. “Although no one would think twice about having Norman Mailer review James Baldwin,” he observes, “no one at the Times would have easily accepted the idea of Angela Davis reviewing William Buckley.” But his efforts were rarely successful, which served to perpetuate the belief that black writers could only write about black subjects. Another African American editor at the Book Review, Rosemary Bray, recounts in her memoir, Unafraid of the Dark, how she was turned down for the job of daily book critic in the early 1990s. After looking at her clips, the hiring editor determined that she wasn’t ready yet: too much of her writing was about black people and she needed to expand her range.
During his nineteen years at the Times, that accusation would never be hurled at my dad. From the beginning, African American writers and intellectuals believed that he was particularly hard on black authors. It’s true that he was harshly critical of any writer whom he judged to be sacrificing aesthetic concerns for a political agenda. About Toni Morrison’s otherwise well-regarded fourth novel, he wrote: “Tar Baby may be described as a protest novel, but the reader might have a few protests too,” and then went on to pick apart Morrison’s book. At the same time, Mel Watkins remembers my father defending Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, leader of the Black Panther Party in the late sixties, because the memoir delivered its message with inimitable style. What’s certain is that my dad didn’t use his platform to promote black literature, a fact that made some African Americans who knew about his ancestry very angry.
Among many readers, however, my father’s high-toned pronouncements earned him a devoted following. The novelist Evelyn Toynton, who later became his student and close friend, recalls discovering my father’s column. “It was so amazing to read anything so literary in a newspaper. I still think it was some of the best literary journalism we’ve ever had in this country.” In his criticism my father was finally able to find the fluidity and confidence that had been evading his fiction. Mel Watkins comments: “What I found fascinating was his ability to take the strict academic or intellectual approach that at the time was presumed to be a part of white culture and combine it with the looseness, vividness, and spontaneity of black culture.” Yet my father still couldn’t synthesize these different aspects of himself in his more personal writing.
After my dad had spent a couple of years on the job as book critic, it became apparent to his publisher that he wasn’t going to finish his novel anytime soon. His editor canceled his contract, and my father had to pay back the advance he’d received fifteen years earlier. But he himself still didn’t give up hope of finishing the book. During his vacation that summer, my father took out the manuscript for the first time in nearly a decade. He started revising the last thing he’d been working on: a chapter about the narrator visiting his newly widowed mother, who has begun to act as if she is dying too, although there’s nothing physically wrong with her. At first the son suspects that she’s trying to shame him into being more attentive, but then he wonders if she’s launched her campaign out of concern for him, as if to say, “Here, feast on me, fill up while you can.”
When my father began this chapter back in the mid-1960s, his mother was as far from death as the mother in the story. But in the intervening years, Edna had suffered a series of small strokes that left her unable to take care of herself. As my father started the new draft, the idea
of his mother’s mortality was no longer abstract. Neither was his guilt about their relationship. Except for lending a hand with the arrangements to move her into a nursing home a few years back, he hadn’t seen his mother much since my brother and I were born.
Say, Mom, what’s this all about. You’re not dying.
I want to have time to say goodbye, Paul. You know I never could move fast.
The previous fall Edna, accompanied by Lorraine, had come out to Connecticut to pay her single visit. I had just turned seven and Todd was nine. In my memory I can see an old unfamiliar woman reclining in a lawn chair, with her feet propped up on a pillow. After spending an hour or two sitting in the backyard, we all had an early dinner at the country club next door, and then Lorraine and Edna drove back into the city.
Last suppers. Meals as elaborate as bequests...she drank me in as if she expected never to see me again.
Among my father’s correspondence, I found a note from his mother dated a week or two prior to this visit. Over the years, she’d sent birthday and holiday cards and letters. Always they struck the same note: chatty and nonconfrontational, with a teasing admonishment of her rascally son and a motherly pride underneath. This note was written in shaky penmanship, and Edna had used a Christmas card, although it was late August. It read: “Dear Anatole,...I am [not] that young and gay and would love to see the children for once in my life. Why don’t you bring [them] or come get me for a day. I would love that very much. I am getting 76 in Dec....Love, Mom.”
Her old-person handwriting and the skipping record of her brain, along with the straightforwardness of her appeal, as if she no longer had time for diplomacy, must have scared my father, for Edna came out a week or two later. Afterward another note arrived, this one addressed to my mother, thanking her for the visit. Edna mentions how pleasant the yard had been to sit in, and how adorable Todd and I were. Perhaps, she writes, she can come again before the weather gets too cold.
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