Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
Maybe it's because I just finished reading Incognegro, a thin graphic novel that leverages the idea of "passing" into a lot of interesting narrative turns, that I found Kafka was the Rage frustrating. I often was drifting to the story that Broyard does not tell, the one where he is a black man passing as white in an environment that prides itself on being open minded and bohemian. It does not help that he essentially dares us to think about this untold story when he writes passages like "To use one of their favorite words, they were alienated. I was not. In fact, one of my problems was that I was alienated from alienation, an insider among outsiders" or even more to the point "I don't think I was anti-Semitic. In the 1920s in New York City, everyone was ethnic -- it was the first thing we noticed... We accepted our ethnicity as a role and even parodied it." It's like a thinly veiled roman a clef, where the clef is "I really didn't want to be black."There is also another story that Broyard does not directly tell -- the way that New York is a city that always seems to be allowed to write its own narrative. Actually subtitled A Greenwich Village Memoir, this book is yet one more love letter to "the City", where, we are told, people read and screwed better than they did anywhere else. Because of how books get published and perpetuated, I have a hard time believing Kafka would have made it if Broyard was hyperbolically claiming so much in celebration of Des Moines or Sao Paulo. I'd like to watch how literary connections and the allure of NYC influenced each step of this book, from the publisher's advance to the first set of reviews.And as I imagine and construct these hidden stories, I wonder if they dovetail into each other. Was Broyard aware that to become a writer he had to position himself in the New York literary world, and that it would be easier to do so if he was white? Was this literary desire the primary basis for his decision? It seems at least plausible given how much he claims to love books. That story would have been one I'd have been more interested to read.What did make it to the page isn't particularly engaging. He hooks up with a girl, decides she's crazy, parties with some famous and semi-famous writers, and then wraps up the whole thing with a series of vignettes of all the women he nails after dumping the crazy girl. I was surprised to find that this last part, which could have easily been the most annoying and self-indulgent section of the book, was where Broyard really did his best writing, and the results were often lyrical and stunning.
In dem autobiografischen Text des späteren Times-Kritikers wird ein lebendiges Bild des Greenwich Village im Jahre 1947 entwickelt. Alle sind auf der Suche nach Literatur, Kultur, Freiheit (nach Kriegsende) und ... nach Sex. Und letzterer ist scheinbar nicht immer so leicht zu finden, aber auch von einer geheimnisvolleren Aura als in späteren Jahre umgeben. Das intellektuelle Klima wird stark von der New School of Social Research geprägt, und damit von den Psychologen, Philosophen und anderen Denkern aus Europa, die hierher vor den Nazis flohen. Literatur scheint in dieser Zeit so notwendig wie die Luft zum Atmen und die Auseinandersetzung mit vielen heute noch namhaften Literaten macht den besonderen Reiz beim Lesen aus.Was man dem Buch zunächst nicht anmerkt: Der Verfasser, der sich seinen Leben lang als Weißer ausgab, war eigentlich schwarz. Selbst seine Kinder erfuhren über seine Herkunft erst wenige Tage vor seinem Tod. Das erinnert sehr an die Geschichte, die Philip Roths in Der menschliche MakelDer menschliche Makel erzählt – Roth hat das übrigens abgestritten. Vor diesem Hintergrund lesen sich aber auch einzelne Passagen des Buches anders. Wenn Broyard Jazz als kitschig und sentimental beschreibt und von Geschwätzigkeit in der schwarzen Kultur spricht, scheint er sich nicht nur geschmacklich abgrenzen zu wollen und wenn er über das Judentum seines besten Freundes schreibt, setzt er sich ebenfalls mit dem Anderssein einer Randgruppe auseinander – dabei sind seine Äußerungen weder rassistisch oder antisemitisch, sondern vor allem Ausdruck seiner Zeit und dem Versuch sich selbst zu definieren.
What do You think about Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1997)?
After serving in World War II, Anatole Broyard moved to Greenwich Village, opened a bookstore, attended the New School and moved in with his artist girlfriend. This book recounts his life and Greenwich Village at the time which he describes on page one: "Sheri Donatti had the kind of personality that was just coming into vogue in Greenwich Village in 1946. This was a time when Kafka was the rage, as were Abstract Expressionists and revisionism in psychoanalysis. Sheri was her own avant-garde"One appeal to this book for me was the matter of fact cameo appearances of the famous. W.H. Auden becomes tangled with Sheri, Eric Fromm, Karen Horney give lectures at the New School, they visit Anais Nin(Broyard also recounts the description of their visit in Nin's diaries) he goes to a party with Dylan Thomas. Broyard writes:"You forget Dylan's faults when you read his poems or hear him recite, but he was not at his best at parties. To him, being at an American party was like being in a bad pub with the wrong people. He appeared to have no small talk- or hardly any kind. The slender young men bounced off him in disappointment"The book also recounts that era's discussions of literature, music, and art as well as the parks and entertainment of Greenwich Village. I found the memoir to be a good read, a kind of travelogue into not just a different place but of a different time
—Andy Miller
Greenwich Village in the 1940s, the East Village in the 1960s, Bed-Stuy today: the scene may have drifted, but the mannerisms of artsy, precocious (and pretentious) lit-bros and -chicks have changed but little. Gaddis skewered them perfectly in The Recognitions; Broyard has no intention of that. Everything he says is autobiographical, including meetings with Anaïs Nin, Maya Deren, Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, and many other avant-garde superstars. But more importantly, it's completely sincere. Broyard has a wonderful nature, kind and free of pretensions. He plays down his own gifts as a jazz critic to praise the artists and writers around him, seeing past their vanity and personal problems and underlining instead their creative brilliance. He wrote this unfinished memoir on his deathbed in the 1980s with undisguised nostalgia, and he casts its warm glow over everything that happened back then. And so you get a picture of a well-spent youth in an age just recovering from two wars, daring to think the unthinkable and tear down the old taboos. People live in small, run-down apartments, drink imprudently, read obsessively and fill the streets with talk of ideas. I couldn't stop underlining.
—Josh Friedlander
From the prologue/epilogue notes, it seems Anatole Broyard passed away before he was able to finish putting this thing together, and I'll admit, it shows. BUT, even though he didn't get to keep writing and/or edit this slender collection of essays with an eye towards shaping it into a more consciously-formed narrative arc, they're still well-written and there are impressive little tidy turns throughout the prose that makes this book worth reading. If you are interested at all in the Beatnik/Greenwich Village scene that existed during the 1940s/50s, this book is incredibly useful. "Sheri Donatti" is Sheri Martinelli in real life; worth a Google. The blurbs compare it to A Moveable Feast, but I had no idea this book even existed until I stumbled upon it in a small little indie Village bookstore, which is kind of a shame.
—Suzanne
