Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [45]
Delmore had a peculiar walk, like Dr. Caligari in the movie. He took short, quick steps, as if he had adopted the European walk of his favorite writers, of Dostoyevski perhaps, as opposed to the loping American style. He walked in sputters, in short manic bursts, like his talk. And he was always bumping into me, because he veered when he walked—when he did anything. When he had pushed me almost into the gutter or up against the buildings, I would drop back and come up on the other side of him.
He was telling me a long and intricate story about Milton Klonsky, who was a friend of his and a much closer friend of mine. The story was untrue from beginning to end, yet anyone who knew Klonsky would probably have believed it. I almost did myself. Even as I laughed at the outrageousness of Delmore’s invention, I felt myself slipping. In my mind’s eye, I could see Klonsky as Delmore presented him, frowning and expostulating in his pleasantly tinny voice. Klonsky had an inhibition about going to the toilet when anyone was in his apartment, so he and Margaret, the girl who lived with him, had tacitly agreed upon a routine. After breakfast, when Klonsky had drunk several-cups of coffee, Margaret would announce that she had errands to run and she would go out for about forty-five minutes.
The scheme worked for a while, but then Klonsky rounded on Margaret one day. Why can’t you show a little imagination? he said. It’s always the same thing with you—a container of milk, a loaf of bread, a bottle of shampoo, stamps. Surely there’s more than that to the life of a young woman in a great city like New York. Why, you don’t even write letters—what do you need with stamps?
In Delmore’s version, the story, punctuated by giggles, went on for fifteen minutes. His mind tossed off details like a dog shaking off drops of water. The toilet was badly situated; it jutted into the living room like a corner fireplace. It had a perforated door, like a rattan chair. A perforated door!
Except for three or four short stories and a handful of poems, I never thought that Delmore’s work was as interesting as his talk. When I knew him, he had already written his best things and most of his talent went into talking. Slander was his genius. Yet his slanders were as lyrical as his best poems. He loved slander as you love the poems and stories you can’t write.
Klonsky was already a rich character, but Delmore embellished him. Klonsky had all the personal peculiarities of a very good writer and Delmore exaggerated these to the point where Klonsky took on the behaviorial tics of a bad writer. In Delmore’s version of him, Klonsky invariably went too far; he overshot the truth and spilled into obsession. He was like a story whose images are too heavy, whose metaphors are too self-conscious, whose language is strained, and whose technique is outmoded.
When Delmore described anyone, they regressed; they lost their saving graces, their scruples and hesitations. He made everyone Dostoyevskian—but in an anachronistic twentieth-century setting. His favorite trick was to take away their irony and leave them exposed. He was like the grammar-school bully who rips open your fly buttons.
I almost wished that Klonsky would do all the things Delmore described, that he would get them off his chest. Delmore’s malice was so brilliant, so unerring, it exalted Klonsky; it freed him to be terrible. It was Delmore who helped me to understand what I came to think of as the malice of modern art.
Meanwhile, as we walked, the city passed unnoticed. Like Samuel Johnson, whom he resembled in many ways, Delmore was not interested in prospects, views, or landscape. He had looked at the city when he was young and saw no need