Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [46]
At Brooks Brothers, we went up to the sixth floor, to the less expensive suits. As we waited for the elevator, with Delmore fidgeting beside me, I was reminded of Dostoyevski’s Underground Man, who bought new gloves, a new hat, and a fur collar for his coat—all for the purpose of colliding with an officer on the boulevard where he went for a walk each Sunday. When he met the officer in the crowded street, it was always he who had to give way, and now he was determined to throw himself against this haughty creature. But first his clothes must be equal to the occasion.
Delmore seemed nervous and I began to think he was serious about being unable to look at himself in a mirror. He was wearing a threadbare gray flannel suit and proposed to buy another one just like it. When the salesman asked him what size he wore, Delmore said he didn’t know. Unlike the Jews of his father’s generation, he regarded the subject of clothing as a somehow gentile business.
The salesman held up a suit and Delmore looked blindly at it. What do you think? he said to me, and I realized that this unworldly man saw me as worldly. I remembered another time when he had asked me for an opinion. We were walking that day too and he asked me to walk him home because he wanted to give me his new book, Vaudeville for a Princess. When I objected that he couldn’t afford to give everyone a copy of his book, he said, Not everyone—I want to give a copy to you. You have less talent for concealing your opinion than most of my friends—I can get the truth out of you.
At his apartment he pondered for a long time over an inscription for the book. He had once proposed, he said, to write “hypocrite lecteur,” a phrase from Baudelaire, in a book he was giving to Will Barrett, but Barrett objected. When he finally gave me the book, I saw that he had written, For Anatole, from Delmore, in a microscopic hand.
I took the book home and read it over and over, trying to think of something good to say about it—but I needn’t have worried, because he never asked me.
Delmore went into the dressing room and put on the suit. When he came out, the salesman buttoned the jacket and turned up the trouser cuffs. He tried to usher Delmore to the three-way mirror, but Delmore turned his back to it and asked me again, What do you think?
Delmore had a swaybacked stance that made the jacket gape at the collar and ride up on his belly, so that the skirts pulled together in front. Nobody ever looked less dressed in a suit. He could even turn buying a suit into a tragedy.
He had once been handsome, like poetry itself. I had seen early pictures of him, carefully lighted, shot on a slant, as if he was ascending, or descending. I believe there was sculpture behind him in one shot. But now he was heavy and you could see what he meant by “the withness of the body,” or “the heavy bear who goes with me.”
I gazed at him in the suit. What good could it do? I wondered. Can a suit make him sane? He ought to wear it just like that, with the trousers rolled and the jacket riding up in front.
He raised and lowered his arms. He shrugged his shoulders to settle the suit, but it wouldn’t come right. How do I look? he asked.
Turn around, I said. Let me see the back. And behind his back, I made up my mind.
I thought that here on the sixth floor of Brooks Brothers, the salesman was the public, I was the critic and Delmore was the poet. I thought I saw dried shaving cream in one of Delmore’s ears. I thought of a line by Tristan Tzara: “The lonely poet, great wheelbarrow of the swamps.”
17
After Sheri, I thought once again that now, at last, I would have what people call a normal sex life. I felt like a man who goes back to college after knocking about the world in a tramp steamer. I saw myself as someone who has been robbed of his youth—first by the war and then by Sheri—and I wanted to be young again. I wanted to be ordinary. I could hardly imagine what sleeping with an ordinary girl would