Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [0]
Kafka Was the Rage
“Lively and amusing … a wide-eyed, fond look at a band of eager adventurers … making their way through the forests of thought and sex.”
—New York Magazine
“Some writing is so rich that commentary is superfluous, even presumptuous. That’s the case with Anatole Broyard.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Greenwich Village was Broyard’s Waiden Pond. And like Waiden, this book will become a classic.”
—Arthur Danto
“Its pages are charged with feeling…. [Broyard] was able to move past irony into unabashed nostalgia and … makes us long for the Village he too quickly left behind.”
—Pete Hamill, The New York Observer
“A funny, loving, reflective, and astringent memoir…. This is Anatole at his best.”
—Alfred Kazin
“[Broyard is] a gifted, often scintillating writer who … seldom fails to reward the reader in delightful and surprising ways.”
—Boston Globe
“Haunting … unforgettable … [Kafka Was the Rage] reveals the texture and contours of [Broyard’s] mind … and what an excellent critic and consciousness he was.”
—Newsday
“So well executed that this little book seems an essential part of what every New Yorker ought to know about this town.”
—Stanley Crouch, Daily News
Books by
ANATOLE BROYARD
Intoxicated by My Illness
Kafka Was the Rage:
A Greenwich Village Memoir
ANATOLE BROYARD
Kafka Was the Rage
Anatole Broyard was a book critic, columnist, and editor for The New York Times for eighteen years. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Intoxicated by My Illness (Clarkson Potter, 1992). He died in 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
About the Author
Title Page
Prefatory Remarks
Part One - Sheri
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Two - After Sheri
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Postscript
Copyright
PREFATORY REMARKS
I think there’s a great nostalgia for life in New York City, especially in Greenwich Village in the period just after World War II. We were all so grateful to be there—it was like a reward for having fought the war. There was a sense of coming back to life, a terrific energy and curiosity, even a feeling of destiny arising out of the war that had just ended. The Village, like New York City itself, had an immense, beckoning sweetness. It was like Paris in the twenties—with the difference that it was our city. We weren’t strangers there, but familiars. The Village was charming, shabby, intimate, accessible, almost like a street fair. We lived in the bars and on the benches of Washington Square. We shared the adventure of trying to be, starting to be, writers or painters.
American life was changing and we rode those changes. The changes were social, sexual, exciting—all the more so because we were young. It was as if we were sharing a common youth with the country itself. We were made anxious by all the changes, yet we were helping to define them.
The two great changes that interested me the most were the movements toward sexual freedom and toward abstraction in art and literature, even in life itself. These two movements concerned me not as social history, but as immediate issues in my daily life. I was ambivalent about both of them and my struggle with them is part of the energy of the narrative.
An innocent, a provincial from the French Quarter in New Orleans and from Brooklyn, I moved in with Sheri Donatti, who was a more radical version of Anaïs Nin, whose protégée she was. Sheri embodied all the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis. She was to be my sentimental education. I opened a bookstore, went to the New School under the GI Bill. I began to think about becoming a writer. I thought about the relation between men and women as it was in 1947, when they were still locked in what Aldous Huxley called a hostile symbiosis. In the background, like landscape, like weather, was what we read and talked