Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [12]
There was something in the way a particular person would take a book from a shelf, the way it was opened and sniffed, that made me want to snatch it away. Others would seize upon a book that was obviously beyond them. I could tell by their faces, their clothes, by their manners, the way they moved, that they’d misread the book or get nothing out of it. The kind of person who is satirized or attacked in a book is often the very person to buy it and pretend to enjoy it. As Mallarmé said, “If a person of average intelligence and insufficient literary preparation opens one of my books and pretends to enjoy it, there has been a mistake. Things must be returned to their places.”
It was the talkers who gave me the most trouble. Like the people who had sold me books, the talkers wanted to sell me their lives, their fictions about themselves, their philosophies. Following the example of the authors on the shelves, infected perhaps by them, they told me of their families, their love affairs, their illusions and disillusionments. I was indignant. I wanted to say, Wait a minute! I’ve already got stories here! Take a look at those shelves!
While I pretended to listen, I asked myself which were more real—theirs, or the stories on the shelves. “The familiar man makes the hero artificial,” Wallace Stevens said. In the commonplaceness of their narratives, some of these talkers anticipated the direction that American fiction would eventually take—away from the heroic, the larger than life, toward the ordinary, the smaller than life.
As they talked on, I thought of all the junk I had carried out of the shop—the boilers, bathtubs, and radiators. These people were bringing it all back—all the clutter, the cast-off odds and ends of their lives. It was more than I had bargained for. Literature was tough enough, with its gaudy sadness, but this miscellany—these heartaches off the street—was too much for me. In the contest between life and literature, life wins every time.
5
Sheri took me to see Anaïs Nin, who lived in the Village at that time. According to her diary, which was published years later, Anaïs had spiritually adopted Sheri, describing her as the ghost of her own younger self. She spoke of Sheri as a disciple. “So they come,” she wrote, “out of the stories, out of the novels, magnetized by affinities, by similar characters.” Sheri was “an orphaned child of poverty … pleading, hurt, vulnerable, breathless.” “She talks as I write, as if I had created a language for her feelings.”
Anaïs’ apartment was a top-floor walk-up on Thirteenth Street. Everyone Sheri knew lived on top floors, probably because it was cheaper, but I thought of them as struggling to get to the light. Besides Anaïs and her husband, Ian Hugo, a pleasant, self-effacing man, there was a young couple whose names I no longer remember. The young man held a guitar across his knees, but you could see that he would never play it, that it was just part of a composition, like the guitars in Cubist paintings.
Though I hadn’t yet read anything by Anaïs, I’d heard of her. It was said that she and Henry Miller had once lived on a houseboat on the Seine. Later I would learn that she had attracted Otto Rank, who allegedly trained her as a psychoanalyst, and who asked her to rewrite his almost unreadable books. In New York she had an odd acquaintance with Edmund Wilson. After Mary McCarthy left him, he developed a crush on Anaïs and took her to his apartment, which Mary had stripped of furniture. When he reviewed one of her novels, you could see him struggling between his desire and his taste. As usual, though, she had the last word in her diary. Summarizing their evening together, she said, “He wanted me to help him reconstruct his life, to help him choose a couch…. But I wanted to leave.”
Anaïs was a medium-sized woman with a