Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [52]
There was another kind of silence: the silence of the body, not only in sex but in its other functions. I’ve known girls who never, even if they stayed a week at my apartment, had a bowel movement. If orgasm was difficult, excretion was impossible. And so these poor girls would be twice constipated, would have a double bellyache. In my small apartment, the toilet was too near, like the nearness of shame.
I could see the evidence of this withholding in their clouded eyes, their fading complexions, even their speech patterns. Their faces would get puffy, their bellies would be distended, their bodies knotted. Their sentences would clot as they longed to get away, to let go of it all.
If I had known how to reassure these girls, or if I had remained with any of them long enough, they might have relaxed and become natural with me, and I with them. But I was driven with restlessness. I was still looking for transfiguration, as I had said to Dr. Schachtel—it was transfiguration or nothing. But transfiguration had to start somewhere, and I never gave it a chance. There was another obstacle, too: I was just learning how to write, I turned everything into literature, and this was something no affair could survive.
Although their bodies were often beautiful to me and their personalities as appealing as our inhibitions allowed them to be, it was ultimately with girls’ souls that I grappled. No matter what we said or did, I couldn’t get away from their souls. Their souls lay beside us in the bed, watching, sorrowing. Perhaps I needed their souls—there is no other explanation for their inconvenient presence—but I didn’t know what to do with them, any more than I knew what to do with my own.
I was looking for so much in each girl and she was looking for so much in me, we confused and depressed each other. I think too that I may have muddled sex and literature. The tension and the excitement were so similar that sometimes the two things were as difficult to distinguish as the tolling of distant church bells.
I remember once I was walking in the street with my friend Milton Klonsky and we were talking seriously, deeply, about books when we passed a wonderful-looking girl. She must have seen the admiration in my face, because she smiled, a little conspiratorial smile. I broke off in the middle of a sentence and ran after her, which enraged Milton. I could never make him understand that, at the moment when she smiled, I saw her as the incarnation of meaning.
POSTSCRIPT
When Anatole became ill in 1988, he set aside this memoir to write about his illness and was never able to work on it again. He intended the last part of this book to be about the death of his father. In a letter to his publisher he wrote: “The death of my father was like the end of an era for me, like the 1929 Depression that sent the American expatriates home from Paris. In a way, I had been an expatriate in the Village, living in a style that was essentially foreign to me. I was flying, like a Freudian dream of flying, and the book ends with my attempt to come back down to earth.”
Although Anatole often talked about his work, I don’t know what was in his mind when he wrote, “the book ends with my attempt to come back down to earth.” Yet I know the story of his life, having been his wife for twenty-nine years, first living in Greenwich Village, then moving to Connecticut, where we raised two children. Anatole, in my view, came back down to earth by becoming a father. He came back down to earth by writing about books for The New York Times, being immersed in literature. Words supported his spirit. And books provided the work that supported his family and home. They were the ballast, the lifeline that gently, gradually, lowered him back down to solid ground through time and through a succession of places—Greens Farms, Fairfield, and Southport, Connecticut; finally Cambridge, Massachusetts; and always in the summers, Martha’s Vineyard. Unlike Icarus, Anatole, who was luminous