Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [33]
Though I was a good student, I knew I could never be as smart as those Jewish boys who were strangled by their smartness. They were bred to it—their minds had the quickness of racehorses. They had another advantage too: While I was essentially cheerful, filled with a distracting sociability, there was a brooding sadness in the most brilliant of the Jewish boys that turned them inward and made them thoughtful. I saw them as Martians, creatures from a more advanced planet. Next to them I would always be a southerner, a barbarian. They were at home in the city in a way that I wasn’t. Their racing minds were part of its teeming.
You can’t say such things now without being called anti-Semitic—yet even with all my Catholic mythologies I don’t think that I was anti-Semitic. In the 1920s in New York City everyone was ethnic—it was the first thing we noticed. It was as natural to us as our names. We accepted our ethnicity as a role and even parodied it. To us it was always Halloween. Most of our jokes were ethnic jokes—we hardly knew any other kind. We found our differences hilarious. It was part of the adventure of the street and of the school yard that everyone else had grown up among mysteries. Because we were always surprising to one another, there was an element of formality in our friendships.
I still felt some of this surprise, this formality, this mystery, when I was with Saul. He too had a face like an exclamation and a curved nose that the mustache tried to soften. He was small and slight and already balding, as if he had talked his hair off, had raised his eyebrows so many times that his hair had been pushed back once and for all.
Saul was one of the last of a line of romantic intellectuals. Not satisfied to change the way people thought, he wanted to change the way they felt, the way they were, their desires. He was a reformer at heart, but it was not people’s politics he wanted to influence; it was their sensibilities. He thought such changes could be brought about by making distinctions. He saw everything as a making of distinctions. He amassed them the way other people amassed money or possessions. He pursued them as some men pursue women. One day, when all the distinctions had been made, we would know what beauty was, and justice.
While we were close friends, there were many things I didn’t know about Saul. The war still hovered over us; there was a sense of pushing off from it. Yet I had no idea what Saul had done during the war, whether he had been in the service or exempt for some reason. Though I didn’t care one way or the other, it was odd that I didn’t know about those three or four years of his life. He had a job after the war, but I couldn’t have said what he did. I walked him home all the time, yet I had never been in his apartment. When I picked him up there, he was always waiting for me downstairs.
Occasionally Saul referred in a convoluted, Jamesian way to a female companion, but I never met her, and I sometimes thought that she was only a theory of femininity, a sketch for a character. It was hard to picture Saul with a woman. He never talked about sex, and I wondered whether he made love or distinctions with this shadowy creature.
When he got sick Saul was working on a review for The New Leader. Isaac Rosenfeld, who was the book editor, sometimes gave reviews to friends, or friends of friends, even when they hadn’t published anything before. This was not as frivolous as it sounds, because the Village was full of young men like Saul who could be trusted to turn out a decent piece. Just as Negroes knew about jazz, Jews were expected to know how to write reviews.