Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [39]
Yet I couldn’t help showing off a little. I had noticed in taking strolls with Delmore that he was surprised and even impressed by what I thought of as ordinary observations. He seemed to see American life only in the abstract, as a Platonic essence. Sometimes he saw it as vaudeville, but always he saw it through something else. He imposed a form, intellectual or esthetic, on it, as if he couldn’t bear to look at it directly.
Like many other New York writers and intellectuals of his generation, Delmore seemed to me to have read himself right out of American culture. He was a citizen only of literature. His Greenwich Village was part Dostoyevski’s Saint Petersburg and part Kafka’s Amerika.
I admired his high abstraction, his ability to think in noninclusive generalizations, but I pitied him too. I thought his was as much a lost generation as Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s—in fact, more lost. While the writers of the twenties had lost only their illusions, Delmore, the typical New York intellectual of the forties, seemed to have lost the world itself It was as if these men had been blinded by reading. Their heads were so filled with books, fictional characters, and symbols that there was no room for the raw data of actuality. They couldn’t see the small, only the large. They still thought of ordinary people as the proletariat, or the masses.
I wanted to be an intellectual, too, to see life from a great height, yet I didn’t want to give up my sense of connection, my intimacy with things. When I read a book, I always kept one eye on the world, like someone watching the clock.
Anyway, on this particular evening, I started showing off. I did it partly because it was expected of me and partly because I wanted to. I talked about Spanish Harlem. I had been taken there several times by Vincent Livelli, and old friend of mine from Brooklyn College. He was Italian, but he could speak Spanish and he sometimes taught Latin dancing. There was a Latin dance craze in those days. People went to rumba matinees on Saturday afternoons at midtown clubs and Carmen Miranda sambaed her way through New York City in Hollywood musicals.
I told Delmore, Dwight, and Clem that I’d seen a man killed in Spanish Harlem. It was at a dance given by a young man’s club called Los Happy Boys. The victim was a stranger who had tried to enter the dance hall without a ticket. When the ticket taker, a club member called Pablito, tried to stop him, the stranger pulled out a switchblade.
The cry went up that he had killed Pablito, and the whole club descended on the stranger. I saw the whole thing—in fact, I saw it from above, like a box seat—as I was going to the men’s room. The dance hall was on the second floor and the men’s room was down below. I was going down the stairs where Pablito was taking tickets when the stranger came in.
I watched from above as they knocked him down and began to kick and stomp him. It went on for quite a while and I could hear the wet sound as they kicked him. When it was all over, they pulled out handkerchiefs and wiped the blood off their trousers and shoes. By the time the police arrived there was nothing left of the stranger but a suit of clothes and a shapeless mass. The police were philosophical and no charges were pressed.
Then Pablito reappeared. He had a Band-Aid on his forehead, at the hairline. ¡Cómo, he said, que le han matadol! Wow, they killed him! When the club members, the Happy Boys, saw Pablito, they all started to laugh. They rushed at him as if they were going to kill him too, but they were kissing him. They raised him up on their shoulders. Everyone had to see him with their own eyes. Pablito himself was amazed and flattered and a little frightened too that his friends had killed the man. After a while, everyone started laughing. They laughed uncontrollably, pointing to Pablito. He laughed