Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [24]
My parents didn’t know about Sheri, so I told them I’d had a three-month sublet and now I was looking for a permanent place. They said yes, of course, they understood that I needed an apartment of my own—I was a veteran now. I don’t know what the word meant to them, but they used it all the time. They were forever saying, “You’re a veteran now,” as if that explained everything, as if I had been killed in the war and this veteran had come back in my place. They were still thinking about the war, but I had already forgotten it. I was a veteran of Sheri, and the war was nothing to me now.
When I first came back from the army, I had seen Brooklyn as a quiet place, a safe place. Now, after living with Sheri in the Village, I didn’t see it at all, I walked through Brooklyn without looking, without curiosity. I could only remember being a child there.
I had closed the bookshop. For the first time in my life, I felt a distaste for books. I think it was because my experience with Sheri reminded me too much of the books in the shop. Sheri and I were like a story by a young novelist who had been influenced by Kafka. Everyone was influenced by Kafka in those days. People in the Village used the word Kafkaesque the way my parents used veteran.
But without the shop, I had nothing to do all day. I wandered around the Village, ringing superintendents’ bells, asking about apartments. I sat in Washington Square, watched children skating, pigeons begging, the sun going down. Sometimes I rode on top of the Fifth Avenue bus to 110th Street and back. I didn’t want to see any of the people I knew in the Village because they reminded me of Sheri and I knew they would ask me about her.
Then, just when I needed something to do, my friend Milton Klonsky asked me to collaborate with him on a piece he had been asked to write for Partisan Review. The piece was on modern jazz, a subject neither Milton nor the editors of Partisan knew anything about. Since I had always been interested in jazz, Milton suggested that I write the first draft and he would rewrite it. What he meant was that I’d supply the facts and he’d turn them into prose.
It never even occurred to me to resent this arrangement—I was awed by Partisan Review and flattered by Milton’s offer. I had never written anything but notes to myself. I was always scribbling on little pads I carried around, jotting down ideas, phrases, images. Half of the young men in the Village were writing such notes. They wrote them in cafes, in the park, even on the street. You’d see them stop and pull out their pads or notebooks to jot down something that had just struck them—the color of the sky, the bend of a street, an incongruity. These notes were postcards to literature that we never mailed.
I took Milton’s proposal very seriously. I would go upstairs in my parents’ house and listen to jazz for hours, playing records over and over. It suited my mood, which was like the lyrics of a blues song. I had always liked old jazz—from Louis Armstrong to Lester Young—but I hadn’t made up my mind about Charlie Parker, who was everybody’s hero at that time. While he could be brilliant, I found in Parker’s style a hint of the garrulousness that would soon come over black culture.
Also, it seemed to me that jazz relied too much on improvisation to be a full-fledged art form. Nobody could be that good on the spur of the moment. And there was too much cuteness in jazz. It stammered and strained. It took its sentimentality for wisdom.
I tried to imagine what Meyer Schapiro would say about jazz. Was it like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a fracturing of music, like the splitting of the atom? But there was something momentous, something world-shaking, about the Demoiselles that jazz didn’t have. It seemed to me that jazz was just folk art. It might be terrific folk art, but it was still only local and temporary.