Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [38]
No, he said at last. I’d rather you didn’t come back. You were terrific today, and so was I—but tomorrow we’d be terrible.
Terrible? I said. I don’t know—maybe. Would it be so terrible to be terrible?
He thought about this. He turned it over in his mind, the levels of terribleness. You have no idea how busy I am, he said. They tell me there isn’t much time, and I want to finish the review. I’d like to be published.
I knew that wasn’t the real reason. He wouldn’t let me come back because he couldn’t bear the simplicity of being sick, the ordinariness of it. He didn’t know how to be ordinary; he had been taught that he was special. To be ordinary might lead to sentimentality, and he was more afraid of sentimentality than he was of being alone. Sentimental was the cruelest word in literary criticism. It was a goyish trait, like getting drunk. At that moment, Saul reminded me of a man who is asked on his deathbed to embrace a religion and refuses. There was to be no relenting. For the first time, I saw, with a kind of horror, that books had been everything to him.
He had invited me to stand outside the event with him, as a fellow critic—but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t that intellectual. His situation brought out all the homeliness in me, the sloppiness. My feelings had no style. To Saul, my sympathy would have seemed almost bestial, the disorderly impulse of a more primitive civilization. He had always been lofty and distant—why should he change now? It was typical of him to give a new meaning to the expression critically ill. If I thought he was escaping into literature, I had to remind myself that literature had been our only intimacy.
We shook hands. We did it like Europeans, our hands held high and our wrists bent. When I went down the stairs, my eyes misted up and I had to hold on to the rail.
The station was empty, yet it seemed to be full of thundering trains. I paced along the platform and asked myself whether I had done everything I could. He had rushed me—there hadn’t been time to feel, to think. I wanted to run back up the stairs and go after him, but I was afraid of displeasing him. Though I was young and self-centered and thought I would never die, though I secretly felt it was perverse of Saul to get sick, I loved and admired him. Whether he wanted to hear them or hot, there were things I wanted to say to him. How could I go away like this without saying them?
I felt cheated—not only of Saul, my friend, my companion, but of something else, something more. I think it was reality itself I felt cheated of, ordinary reality. It was as if he didn’t trust me with it. He was disappearing into the difference between us, into his history. He was saying, You can’t understand how I feel, what I am. My tragedy is older and darker than your tragedy. You can’t come into my ghetto. But even if this had been true—and I don’t know that it was—there were other possibilities open to us. He had always behaved as if understanding was everything.
I rehearsed these things all the way home, fussing and muttering, one of those people who talks to himself on the subway. At Canal Street, I got up and stood by the door. I could see my face in the glass. But where’s the catharsis? I said. Where’s the catharsis?
He went into the hospital a couple of days after that. When I telephoned him, his mother was always beside the bed. Then one day someone else answered and said that Saul was no longer there. When I called his mother, she said, He’s dead. That’s the word she used. She pronounced both d’s.
14
One night in the San Remo Bar Delmore Schwartz invited me to sit in a booth with him. He was with Dwight Macdonald and Clem Greenberg. I was flattered. I knew Delmore because he had accepted for Partisan Review a piece I’d written called “Portrait of the Hipster.”
They were talking about the primitive: Picasso, D. H. Lawrence, and Hemingway; bullfighting and boxing. I was a bit uneasy, because my piece was about