In 1946 an American veteran of the war in Japan called Anatole Broyard arrived in New York’s hipster capital, Greenwich Village, his goal the getting of an education courtesy of the US government, which was paying for it under the terms of the G.I. Bill, and embracing the alluring sweetness of la vie bohème. This memoir, written forty years later but abandoned unfinished when Broyard, by then the New York Times’s leading book critic, learned he was terminally ill, is the story of that awkward, hard-won transformation from soldier to scholar. It’s a beautiful, touching, wryly funny book that looks back with serene clarity on a lost domain where nothing mattered more than books. Apart from sex.
Amid the mordant but never snide portraits of Village figures like Delmore Schwartz (who would later teach Lou Reed at Syracuse University), Anaïs Nin, and a visiting Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, Broyard’s account of his kooky relationship with the painter “Sheri Donatti” (the name is a pseudonym for Sheri Martinelli, “Queen of the Beats,” friend and/or lover to Ezra Pound, Charlie Parker, and William Gaddis) stands out. Avant-garde in her life as well as her art, Donatti never wore underwear and, Broyard notes archly, embodied the latest trends in art, sex, and psychosis, faking a heart condition that obliged Broyard to carry her up the stairs to the top-floor apartments where her artist friends lived. Even her seduction of him was abstract: she told him she never had orgasms because she didn’t want them.
After his death it emerged there had been limits to Broyard’s self-disclosure. Although he passed as white for most of his adult life, he was of mixed-race ancestry and had taken advantage of Greenwich Village’s anything-goes milieu to slough off the Creole identity he had borne growing up in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This transfiguration left a complicated legacy for the children he concealed it from. One of them, the writer Bliss Broyard, has explored it in detail in her own work.
But how beautifully he writes about transfigurations, especially thwarted ones. Unloading to his therapist, Broyard wonders why characters in novels are elevated by love and yet he hasn’t been so far. Sex is fine, but it isn’t enough. It can’t account for the great mass of art that insists on love as a transcendence of the physical, or for the extremes of emotion it inspires.
In the end, this is another of Bowie’s beloved books about artistic scenes—the magical gestalt energy of them; the way their actions, even trivial ones like not wearing knickers, transform the wider culture by expanding people’s sense of what it could and should be.