Living in Greenwich Village was everything my father dreamed it might be during those nights standing watch in the South Seas. The GI Bill provided a small stipend and paid for his classes in modern art and psychology at the New School. And Sheri gave him the chance to apply his professors’ abstract theories about avant-gardism and neuroses firsthand. He later wrote that she required a process of continual adjustment, “like living in a foreign city.”
Sheri was unlike anyone my father had ever known. Dressed in dirndl skirts (to hide her heavy thighs) and no underwear (to my father’s consternation), she had a wide tall forehead, large pale blue eyes set under high arched brows, and a thin pointed chin. Among the piles of unopened mail that covered the ironing board perpetually set up in her kitchen were unopened checks for lingerie spreads she’d done for Vogue magazine. In a voice that placed equal emphasis on each syllable, as if she were speaking an unfamiliar language, Sheri offered her pronouncements: she didn’t trust what she read in books, she wasn’t interested in having orgasms, my father would never be a man as long as he expected to understand everything.
Sheri liked to create mysteries. Not long after they moved in together, two different friends of my father’s came over to tell him that they were better matches for her than he was. After the second one, he realized that Sheri had put them up to it. Then she announced that a doctor had diagnosed her as having a defective heart and that she could no longer climb stairs. For the next few months, anytime they visited friends (who all seemed to live in top-floor apartments, which were cheaper and offered the painters more light), my father dutifully carried her up the five flights. He later realized that she’d made up the condition. Even as he loved her, he secretly believed that she was weird, while he worried that she thought he was too conventional.
Yet they had things in common. Sheri had also left behind a failed marriage and young daughter. Her mother was born in New Orleans, so there was no need for my father to explain his Creole identity. And they were both drawn to the new trends in art and culture. Sheri introduced my dad to Anaïs Nin, who later described him in her diary as “New Orleans French, handsome, sensual, ironic.” The couple passed their evenings with friends at the San Remo bar—derided by one poet as “the restlessly crowded hangout...and catch-all for whatever survived of dedicated Bohemianism in Greenwich Village.”
Before long my father found an old junk dealer’s shop on Cornelia Street for his bookstore. After clearing out all the old boilers, pipes, and radiators, Nat helped him to make bookshelves for the front room. But my dad never had enough stock to fill them, and the few dozen copies of Kafka, Céline, Kenneth Burke, Paul Valéry, and García Lorca that made up his selection sat on a table near the door.
Customers were few. Most of the serious readers in the Village already had more books than money, and my father tended to dissuade the nonserious readers who wandered in from buying books that he considered above them. He wasn’t being protective of potential clients but of authors. It would be a betrayal of his literary heroes to allow them to be read by someone who might not appreciate or understand them.
While the bookstore was a financial failure and my father would eventually be forced to close it, it served as a hangout for the writers and intellectuals in the neighborhood. My father and his visitors would sit around a large potbellied stove in the back and talk. There were his friends from Brooklyn College Milton Klonsky and Vincent Livelli; the writers William Gaddis and Chandler Brossard (both of whom would later publish romans à clef negatively portraying my father); and art students such as Larry Rivers from Hans Hofmann’s Expressionist classes down the street. After hours, on a mattress pushed into the corner, there were clandestine visits from a parade of different girls.
If it weren’t for books, my father later observed, the young men of his crowd would have been completely at the mercy of sex. Books gave them balance, gravity, something else to fill the waking hours. But literature wasn’t just a diversion from the corporeal pleasures of the real world; in some ways it comprised the real world. My father and his friends didn’t know where books stopped and they began. My dad’s favorite writers became his adopted family. “With them, I could trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions. I could lead a hypothetical life, unencumbered by memory, loyalties, or resentments.”
It was a project he took very seriously. Vincent Livelli recalls my dad’s rehearsing his observations about a painter or memorizing lines of poetry to insert into dinner conversation at the San Remo later that evening. Together Vincent and my dad worked out a strategy to ensure that they controlled the topic of the conversation, so as to benefit from their prepping. Vincent might bring up the novel Tropic of Cancer, which would lead my father to mention Baudelaire’s influence on Henry Miller, spouting a few lines from the poet and Miller’s prose to make his point.
Because Vincent wasn’t as intellectually inclined as the other young men, he welcomed this advantage. For my dad conversation was a sport and required training to be competitive like any other. Even with his best friend from college, Milton Klonsky—to whom he remained unceasingly loyal, even as Milton grew increasingly difficult and hermetic and lost most of his friends—my dad would try to verbally pin him to the floor. And Klonsky was no lightweight opponent. As he later said of himself: “I’m famous, not so much for what I’ve written...as for the cyclotron of my personality.” His literary contributions were limited to a few volumes on William Blake, but his intelligence was legendary.
I recognize my father’s conversational style from my own family dinner table: his refusal to give up center stage, impatience with topics that he didn’t know anything about, and aggressive tactics even when he was clearly on top. Sometimes when I was in the middle of a story, he would interrupt me with such little regard that I would doubt for a moment that I’d been speaking at all. When I protested, he would silence me with the complaint that I was being “boring”—the worst imaginable crime.
It’s tempting to blame this behavior on those nights at the San Remo. My dad, with his hangover of black intellectual inferiority, when seated among the other men—who were mostly Jewish and assumed by him to be naturally bright and analytical—turned into the runt of the litter, forced to bite and kick his way to the teat. But it’s just as likely that my father was simply as competitive as the next guy: determined to win the argument, get the girl, earn the others’ admiration at any cost.
In some ways he never gave up his compulsion to be the most charming person in the room. Yet when my father was in his twenties, the figure he cut in the world was more than just a means to an end. It was all he had. Like an orphan who must make his way on his wits alone, my father no longer had family or community to fall back on. He literally dined off the strength of his personality, and it paid off.
After a few years in Greenwich Village, writers and painters were crowding around the booth that the bouncer saved for him at the San Remo. From his job giving poetry lessons to a crazy millionaire, my dad always had money to buy a round or pick up dinner. Cover girls and daughters of famous men appeared on his arm at parties and later joined him in bed. Jay Landesman, the editor of the short-lived but influential magazine Neurotica, remembers the girl from the Midwest who hated Greenwich Village and kept complaining that she wanted to go home. “Someone finally asked her why she didn’t leave already,” Jay says. “And she said that she wouldn’t leave until Anatole spoke to her.” And most significantly for my father, the editors of those magazines that he’d read so religiously in college—Partisan Review and Commentary—began to publish his writing. This life was a long way from his upbringing as a colored boy in Brooklyn. Ironically, it was his knowledge of that world that helped him to secure his reputation.
Greenwich Village had long been a place where people fled to make themselves over, but the postwar years were a particularly good time for reinvention. The New York intellectuals who crowded the neighborhood’s apartments and cafés had become disillusioned with their political idealism in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. While use of the atomic bomb had abruptly ended a conflict that they expected to drag on for decades, the Soviet Union’s development of nuclear technology meant they now had to live with the knowledge that they could be extinguished in an instant. Add to that the dawning horror of Hitler’s Holocaust, and the world had become a much more serious place. Nobody knew what to believe in anymore.
In the classes that my father was taking at the New School, all the professors—many of them Jewish exiles from Germany—focused on what was wrong: with the world, with America, with the relationships between people. The very dependability of reality was called into question. The art critic Meyer Schapiro demonstrated how Picasso in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon had fractured the picture plane. At the Cedar Tavern, the burgeoning group of Abstract Expressionists talked about ridding the canvas of any verisimilitude and focusing on the action of making the painting itself. French existentialism, by way of translations of Sartre and Camus in the Partisan Review, landed on the Village’s newsstands. Understood originally as more an emotional response to the war in Europe than a formal philosophy, existentialism’s emphasis on individual freedom and absurdity appealed to the prevailing zeitgeist. As Irving Howe, a contributor to the Partisan Review in the early cold war years, observed, “Ideology crumbled, personality bloomed.”
Onto this unexplored frontier a new cultural hero appeared—the hipster. Famously portrayed by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” this latest incarnation of the American individualist rejected all pressures to conform, ignored society’s expectations and traditions, and lived only for the moment and according to the “rebellious imperatives of the self.” Found in New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago, and especially Greenwich Village, Mailer’s hipster took inspiration from “Negroes,” particularly those associated with jazz. Although the hipster was a fleeting phenomenon—subsumed by the end of the 1950s by the Beats—he was crucial in cementing the link between counterculture and African American communities.
Mailer’s essay may have preserved the hipster for posterity, but he wasn’t the first or only person to note his arrival on the Village scene. Nine years earlier, in 1948, my father described the hipster’s aesthetics in the Partisan Review in an essay titled “Portrait of the Hipster.” He was twenty-eight years old at the time, and the piece—his second publication after a short book review—was his attempt to establish himself among the Village intellectuals. The poet Delmore Schwartz, who was working as an editor at the magazine, gave him the assignment. He knew my dad through Milton Klonsky, who almost certainly shared with Schwartz why Anatole Broyard was particularly suited to this topic.
Indeed my father portrayed the hipster’s hero—the black jazz character who hung out at the Savoy Ballroom—with a scientific specificity that only an insider could know: the thirty-one-inch pant leg of his zoot suit and the two-and-seventh-eighths-inch brim of his hat; the white powder streak he wore in his hair and the Ray-Ban sunglasses that perpetually covered his eyes; his secret handshake of brushing palms and preferred greeting of a raised index finger; and the shorthand of his jive speech. Solid “connoted the stuff, the reality of existence”; nowhere, “the hipster’s favorite pejorative, was an abracadabra to make things disappear”; and in there “was, of course, somewhereness,” which was the place the hipster longed to be.
But it was into the hipster’s existential crisis that my father demonstrated the most insight. The hipster’s status, “always of the minority—opposed in race or feeling to those who owned the machinery of recognition,” made him especially anxious to relate to the world in a socially acceptable, meaningful way. Yet the alienated position into which he was born or had found himself made such acceptance nearly impossible. My father suggested in an early draft that the hipster “became a criminal because he was not allowed to become a citizen.”
My dad’s recent change in circumstances offered him a front-row seat to observe the black model for the hipster. He and Sheri had broken up, and when he couldn’t find another apartment, he was forced to move back to Bed-Stuy and live with his parents. During his jaunts to the dance halls of Harlem with his childhood friends, he became an undercover anthropologist, making observations and collecting the data that would help him make his name back on the island of Manhattan.
Soon after the essay appeared, my father ran into Delmore Schwartz in the San Remo bar. Sitting with him were Clement Greenberg, the leading proponent of Abstract Expressionism, and Dwight Macdonald, a famous communist and critic of American culture. The men were talking about the “primitive”—Picasso and Hemingway, bullfighting and boxing—and they invited my father to join them. He sat down reluctantly, worried that his hipster piece would typecast him as “an aficionado of the primitive.” He wanted to be a literary man like them. Yet he couldn’t resist showing off his knowledge of the city’s rawer pleasures.
He told Delmore and his friends about visiting the Park Plaza, a club in Spanish Harlem where a man nicknamed Midnight, for the color of his skin, and another called Electrico, for the speed of his feet, engaged in acrobatic face-offs for the unofficial title of best dancer. At another club he watched a group of men stomp to death a stranger who had tried to gain free entry by wielding a knife. Afterward the men wiped the blood from their shoes with their handkerchiefs before returning to the dance floor. His stories whetted the intellectuals’ appetites. They wanted to see the primitive for themselves. My father suggested that they go to the Park Plaza that very evening; he hailed a cab and they headed uptown.
My father later wrote that although he admired the New York intellectuals for their talent for “high abstraction” and ability to “see life from a great height,” he also pitied them for losing touch with the “raw data of actuality.” Because they’d read themselves right out of American culture, these writers needed people like my father to show them around. But I’m surprised at my dad’s eagerness to play along. In his Partisan Review essay, he scorns the hipster for becoming the darling of the Village intellectuals, who hailed him as the “great instinctual man” and demanded that he interpret the world for them. My father notes that recognition by the literary establishment gave the Negro hipster real somewhereness at last and subsequently ruined him: “His old subversiveness, his ferocity, was now so manifestly rhetorical as to be obviously harmless....He let himself be bought and placed in the zoo.”
But how was my father’s willingness to pimp some Harlem primitive for Delmore and his friends any different? He even found them girls to dance with. Having cast himself as native tour guide, he looked upon the men’s inability to mix with the locals with the contempt of the colonized. Only Dwight Macdonald, “a permanent revolutionary,” seemed at home.
Yet my father persisted in acting as a bridge between the uptown (black) world and the (white intellectual) Village. He started to bring a group of disciples up to Spanish Harlem every Thursday night. He continued to write about the jazz world, Afro-Cuban music, and the sexuality of dancing—none of which were typical subject matter for the average white intellectual. (Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, a Jewish jazz clarinetist, was often described as passing for black after embracing the music and culture.) And my father didn’t shy away from “primitive” pastimes, even working out with George Brown, the boxing coach who was reputed to have trained Hemingway. While in hindsight it might seem that my father was exploiting his access to the black world for his own personal gain, I think he might have argued that he was simply being himself and wasn’t inclined to accommodate his interests to those of the white intellectuals around him.
As it was, most everyone in his circle already knew about his mixed-race ancestry. The writer Herbert Gold, who lived in Greenwich Village then, says that it was the first thing you heard about Anatole Broyard. (Gold, who has written many fiction and nonfiction works, described my dad as “his spade friend, Leroy” in his fictionalized memoir about those years, causing a rift in their friendship.) Neurotica editor Jay Landesman concurs: “Everyone knew Anatole was a Negro. He didn’t deny it in any way. He didn’t affirm it either.”
The novelist Anne Bernays dated my father in the early 1950s. She’d been forewarned by Milton Klonsky’s girlfriend, who introduced them, that Anatole was black although he looked white. After learning that Anne’s father, Edward Bernays (who is often described as the father of public relations), was handling the PR for the NAACP, my dad volunteered that his brother-in-law also worked for the organization. Otherwise he rarely mentioned his background. For Anne’s parents the fact that my father was “downtown” worried them as much as his racial identity. Not only might he give their daughter a black baby, but he wouldn’t be able to support her and the child either. Anne, however, was more concerned with reading all the books that my father gave her and coming up with intelligent things to say about them over dinner.
Of the ten women I spoke with who dated my father during the forties and fifties, all but one were aware of his racial identity—learning it either from someone else or from my father himself. Among my father’s correspondence, there is one terse note from a girl he’d recently dumped who reveals that she’d learned from a mutual friend that my dad was “partly colored.” She writes that she was sorry that my father didn’t trust her enough to tell her himself. But the rest of his old girlfriends, all of whom were white, insist that his racial identity made no difference to them.
Of course these women had styled themselves as rule breakers by moving to the Village and taking up with one of its more notorious denizens. Dating across the color line was just another way of bucking convention. But since my father neither looked nor identified as black, there wasn’t much risk of public censure. The women could be daring and modern without being truly radical. Even in this bohemian haven, interracial couples still attracted the ire of passersby on the street. In public, blacks and whites kept mostly to themselves.
On many nights the writer James Baldwin and the artist Beauford Delaney, both African American, could be found at their own booth at the San Remo. And they might have been joined on occasion by Delaney’s good friend W. F. Lucas, also black, who happened to have grown up with my dad in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I doubt that my father would have ignored Lucas—other black friends from the neighborhood say he was friendly when they bumped into him at jazz clubs—but Lucas, who eventually became a scholar and dramatist, later sniped that my dad was black when he entered the subway in Brooklyn and white when he got out at West Fourth Street in Manhattan.
The conversation at the Baldwin booth wasn’t so different from that at my father’s table—also revolving around modernism, the avant-garde, and aesthetics. But these men (and occasionally women) had to deal with the additional burden and responsibility of being seen as “black artists,” even as they weren’t sure what that label was supposed to mean. Baldwin’s biographer, David Leeming, recounts how the young writer struggled with this problem early in his career: “The question of his identity obsessed him. What was a homosexual? What was a Negro? Was it necessary to live by these ‘presumptuous labels’?”
On a visit to a writer’s colony during the summer of 1948, Baldwin wrote in his journal about his desire to conceive of himself, in Walt Whitman’s formulation, as “containing all roles, classes, ethnic groups, and orientations.” He also realized that he must accept his condition in order to be “free,” inspired perhaps by Sartre’s recent essay in Commentary on the Jew’s need to accept his irreducible difference in the eyes of non-Jews in order to live authentically in the world. Having shelved his identity crisis for the time being, Baldwin wrote in one night “Previous Condition,” his first published work of fiction.
Published in Commentary in October of 1948, the story concerns a young black man who is evicted from his Village apartment because of his race. To his well-meaning white (Jewish) friend who had secretly rented him the apartment, the narrator says, “I know everybody’s in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don’t understand it and don’t want to and spend all my time trying to forget it?” A month after publication, Baldwin left for Paris, where he would be better able to forget his blackness. Delaney, who also had to contend with being labeled a “Negro artist,” no matter his affinity with the Abstract Expressionists, followed his friend to France five years later.
From Baldwin and Delaney’s vantage point, my dad, laughing at the next booth with Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald, had his identity all figured out. He was passing as white, end of story. This observation wasn’t made with particular judgment, but it did make being friends with Anatole difficult. On the other hand, two African American writers who were friendly with my father, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, didn’t view him as dodging black people or black culture. Murray recalls the time he and Ellison spotted Anatole at a party: “He had this blond chick all bent over doing the one-butt shuffle. Anybody could see that he wasn’t denying identification with that particular style, lifestyle, outlook, and whatnot.” Murray says that neither he nor Ellison saw any need for my father to declare himself one way or another.
Yet the question of what he was did weigh on my father’s mind. The focus of his writing and his intellectual inquiries during the late 1940s and early 1950s suggests a preoccupation with black identity in general and his own identity specifically. My father had always been very deliberate in how he presented himself to the world, fastidious in his appearance, careful in his manner of speech, nearly abstemious because he didn’t like to lose control. His relationship to his racial identity would be no less carefully fashioned, resting upon a sound philosophical base.
At the New School, he took course after course in psychology: “Approach to Personality,” “Psychology of Adjustment,” “Toward Knowing Oneself,” and even a semester on the Rorschach method. At age twenty-six my father entered into the first of many analyses that he would undertake over the next forty years. And in his writing, he returned to the examination of social type that he’d begun in his hipster piece, placing next under his lens the Anglo-Saxon, whom he satirized as “so perfectly in harmony with things as they are that when he isn’t laughing his face is expressionless.” Sartre’s essay “Portrait of an Inauthentic Jew” in the May 1948 issue of Commentary provided my father with the necessary framework to explore his ideas about blackness, and he began to work on a similar analysis of Negro inauthenticity.
In Sartre’s formulation, “authenticity for [the Jew] is to live to the full his condition as Jew; inauthenticity is to deny it or to attempt to escape from it.” In other words, a Jewish person had to accept the reality that others saw him as a Jew, with all the prejudices and mythologies that went along with that identification, before he could truly be himself. The alternative, according to Sartre, was pursuing “avenues of flight” that made the Jew complicit with anti-Semitic stereotypes. For example, the Jew’s reputation as excessively self-analytical, particularly among the intellectual class, was not, in Sartre’s opinion, an inherited tendency but an avenue of flight. Other examples were feelings of inferiority, acute anxiety, Jewish anti-Semitism, and altruism (in reaction to the Jew’s supposed money hungering). By recognizing the prejudice that defines his relation to the world, opined Sartre, the Jew can begin to short-circuit his defensive reactions.
In his article “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” which appeared in Commentary in July 1950, my father also identified various avenues of flight: there was “minstrelization,” symbolized by the grinning Negro who seemingly acquiesced to his minority status; “romanticization,” represented by “Negro artists” and others who made a career out of being society’s scapegoat and martyr; the “rejected attitude,” wherein refusal of the Negro’s supposed gaiety and spontaneity resulted in an exaggerated aloofness; and “bestialization,” in which Negroes exploited their reputation as more primitive and sexualized beings. In his recommended cure, however, my father parted ways with Sartre’s model. For the Negro he prescribed a “stubborn adherence to one’s essential self, in spite of the distorting pressures of one’s situation.” By essential self, my father meant “[the Negro’s] innate qualities and developed characteristics as an individual, as distinguished from his preponderantly defensive reactions as a member of an embattled minority.”
Unlike Sartre, he saw no benefit in the minority person’s recognizing that the rest of the world viewed him as irreconcilably different. In fact my father suggested that Negroes could best “authenticate themselves” by proving that they were “fundamentally ‘different’ [from whites] only in appearance.” My father conceded that while the physical fact of blackness could still strike terror into the hearts of white people, especially the prospect of having a “black baby,” he counseled: “The falsity of such physiognomic discrimination becomes immediately apparent when we realize that thousands of Negroes with ‘typical’ features are accepted as whites merely because of light complexion.”
It’s impossible not to read this essay as my father’s attempt to justify the way he was living his life. After all, he could hardly be accused of passing after publishing in one of his crowd’s most widely read magazines a piece that demonstrated his intimate knowledge of the American Negro—a situation, his author biography observed, “which he knows at first hand.” But the essay is more than a blanket apologia. My father truly believed that there wasn’t any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for determining who he was supposed to be was himself.
For much of my childhood, a copy of the July 1950 issue of Commentary magazine sat within arm’s reach of our dinner table, but I didn’t pull it out and read “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro” until a few years after my father died. When I finished I remembered what he’d said when I first learned about the existence of a secret on Martha’s Vineyard: If you want to know me, then why don’t you read more of my writing? Perhaps he’d been thinking of this essay. Yet if I had opened the magazine while he was still alive, I would have been left with more questions, such as why there was a neatly razored hole on the bottom left-hand corner of the first page, where the contributor’s note describing his firsthand knowledge of the American Negro should have been. Apparently his view of black identity was acceptable to share, but the editors’ view on his black identity was not. Once again here was my father picking and choosing about how he would be presented to the world. Here he was hiding in plain sight. I don’t know whether to feel thankful or regretful that I never stumbled on his secret while he was alive.
Few among his Greenwich Village friends seem to have read the “Inauthentic Negro” piece. At least they couldn’t remember it years later, although they recalled other essays my father published during this period. This is particularly curious given the popularity of Sartre and existentialism at that time. It was no small thing for a young, relatively unknown writer to take on the venerable French philosopher. Considering that my dad was addressing the subject of black identity, after all the intrigue about his own background, it’s even more surprising that so little attention was paid to the essay’s publication.
Perhaps “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro” wasn’t memorable because it wasn’t particularly good. Despite his supposed intimate knowledge, my father dismissed the everyday realities of black people’s lives without a backward glance. It was easy for him to suggest that African Americans forget they are Negroes—the world didn’t throw that identification in his face again and again. It was easy for him to recommend that blacks resist the distorting effects of white prejudice—he wasn’t bombarded by it every day.
At a moment in American history when blacks were having trouble finding work and gaining admission to restaurants and clubs, where any good or bad thing they did was chalked up as a credit or embarrassment to their race, when the possibility of being seen with a white woman or getting lost in a white neighborhood could lead to spurious—and life-threatening—conclusions, my father’s prescription of a “stubborn adherence to one’s essential self” was, at best, very weak medicine. Try telling that to his brother-in-law Frank, who the year before had been chased by the Ku Klux Klan after leaving a Florida courthouse, where he’d been consulting on the trial of three black men accused of raping a white woman. After two hours at high speeds, his driver, who was a local African American man, managed to shake their pursuers in a black ghetto in Orlando. Two of the defendants weren’t so lucky: while the sheriff was transferring them to another jail, they allegedly tried to escape and were shot to death.
No matter how many classes my father had taken with the Freudian revisionist Erich Fromm, whose focus was the role of society in shaping the individual, no matter how closely he studied Freud’s thesis in Civilization and Its Discontents about the tension between a man’s freedom and the conformity imposed by civilization, my father still couldn’t see how the hand of the world pushed upon the Negro’s back and how that pressure might make a person want to push back. Yet when someone pinned my father’s race on him—“Look, a Negro!” in the formulation of Martinican writer Frantz Fanon in his essay “The Fact of Blackness,” published in 1952, also in response to Sartre’s analysis of Jewish identity—my dad wasn’t able to turn the other cheek either.
Around the same time that my father was analyzing inauthentic Negroes, his pal Chandler Brossard was writing his roman à clef about the 1940s Greenwich Village scene. My father was under the impression that he was Brossard’s closest friend; after all, he’d served as best man at his wedding a few years earlier. So it must have come as a surprise when word got back to my father that he was the model for the protagonist in Brossard’s novel—a smooth-talking hustler named Henry Porter. And that surprise must have turned to hurt and anger when he received a copy of the manuscript from Brossard’s publishers, who wanted him to sign a release before publication. The novel’s opening paragraph read:
People said Henry Porter was a “passed” Negro. But nobody knew for sure. I think the rumor was started by someone who had grown up with Porter in San Francisco. He did not look part Negro to me. Latin, yes. Anyway, the rumor followed him around. I suspect it was supposed to explain the difference between the way he behaved and the way the rest of us behaved. Porter did not show that he knew people were talking about him this way. I must give him credit for maintaining a front of indifference that was really remarkable.
My father refused to sign the release, and Brossard was forced to change identifying details. In the version that was published, Henry Porter is instead illegitimate, which didn’t carry nearly the same stigma as blackness. Needless to say, the men’s friendship was over. (Twenty years later my father would nearly sabotage his new position as the daily book critic for the New York Times in the process of settling the score.)
My father certainly had reason to feel betrayed. By singling out his racial identity, Brossard made him an exception to the prevailing Village credo that they were all free to discover themselves without being encumbered by familial or ancestral histories. In my dad’s case, the past could never be forgotten, because contrary to what he’d asserted in his essay, it made him fundamentally different from whites, no matter how much he might resemble them. In Brossard’s formulation, my father wasn’t inventing himself like everyone else; he was pretending to be something that he wasn’t. He was a “passed Negro,” which was how my dad’s friends from Bed-Stuy and his family saw it too.
In the postwar years, the rest of my father’s family were growing more accepting of their black identity. Edna quit her job at the Laundromat, which meant that she no longer had to pass for work. Lorraine stopped considering whites-only positions. Even Nat showed signs of relaxing his antiblack attitudes. While he still had to pass at the construction site—as late as 1959, building trade unions in New York City remained segregated—he chose Sag Harbor, a popular black resort area on Long Island, when he bought a plot of land on which to build a weekend home.
My father explained himself to Lorraine by saying that he wanted to be a writer, not a Negro writer. The critics may have hailed Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a great novel about the human condition, but it was still praised in the New York Times as “the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro” that the reviewer had ever read. After five years in Greenwich Village, however, the majority of what my father had published did concern black people and black culture. In 1951 Commentary ran the essay “Keep Cool, Man,” in which my father explored how jazz music had begun to adopt the “rejected attitude” avenue of flight that he’d described in “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro.” This time the contributor’s note described him as “an anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world.”
It’s not the case that my father was assigned these pieces; he came up with them himself. The sociologist Nathan Glazer, who later led the charge against affirmative action and then reversed his position, was an associate editor at Commentary at the time. He recalls that Anatole Broyard wasn’t thought of as an American black writer in the same way that James Baldwin was, although it was common knowledge that Broyard wasn’t entirely white. Mostly, according to Glazer, he was seen as someone who was “au courant” on cultural matters. Yet when he tried to publish an essay that ventured outside the black world, “Marginal Notes on the Anglo-Saxon,” neither Commentary nor Partisan Review wanted it. More to their liking were Chandler Brossard’s tongue-in-cheek observations about how the gentile intellectual, finding himself New York City’s latest Alienated Man, had begun to mimic his Jewish friends.
Eventually a subject that could transcend race presented itself to my father in the form of his father’s stiff neck. When the pain didn’t subside, Nat consulted a doctor, who diagnosed him with metastasized bladder cancer that had spread to his bones. He was dead within two years. Four years later, in the summer of 1954, my father published his first short story—a slightly fictionalized version of his father’s death called “What the Cystoscope Said.”
In his exacting descriptions of the physical and metaphysical devolution that occurs at the end of a person’s life, my father conveyed the terror, love, and wonder of a son attending his father’s death. Everything he felt about his dad was poured into the story—his inability to talk with him; his desire to see him as heroic and recognition that his life was not; the gaps in generation, education, and sophistication between them; and the well of tenderness that rose up at the end—without mentioning the family’s racial identity. In the final scene, the son returns one night to his Greenwich Village apartment to find a package on his doorstep. It’s the box containing his father’s ashes. After bringing it inside and placing it on the bookshelf, he thinks to himself: “I’d heard that ashes were supposed to be scattered from a hilltop to the four winds, or poured into the headwaters of a river going out to sea, but as I looked at the box on the shelf, I knew that those were not our ways....It was my job to sift those ashes and sift them I would, until he rose from them like a phoenix.” In real life the ashes would be moved from one closet to another over the next forty years.
A few months after “What the Cystoscope Said” appeared, my father published a second autobiographical story, “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn,” about the estrangement that a young man from Greenwich Village feels from his parents during his weekly visit to their apartment in Brooklyn. The narrator’s mother and father keep his picture on the mantel next to the clock, but he forgets about his parents each time he says good-bye. “Always, without realizing it, they were wondering what I was, whether to be proud of me or ashamed, whether my strangeness was genius, sickness, or simply evil, whether I had sold my soul like Faust or was still learning to walk, whether I was a hero or an abortion.”
The theme of both stories—the painful, necessary process of separating from one’s family—resonated with many people. By year’s end every major publishing house in New York had contacted him to inquire about expanding these stories into a novel. Eventually my father signed a contract for a sizable advance with Seymour Lawrence at the Atlantic Monthly Press, who was responsible for publishing such writers as Katherine Anne Porter, Pablo Neruda, and Kurt Vonnegut. People in the literary world began waiting for Broyard’s novel. In Advertisements for Myself, Norman Mailer finds some complaint about nearly all contemporary writers except William Burroughs, whom he mentions in a footnote, and my father, about whom Mailer writes: “I’ve read two stories by Anatole Broyard. They are each first-rate, and I would buy a novel by him the day it appeared.”
But that day would be a long time coming. My father had planned for the novel to chronicle a young man’s journey from a provincial Brooklyn boyhood to sophisticated Greenwich Village alienation, with all the discontinuities of self and culture that accompanied that transition. However, trying to capture the life of a young intellectual in the Village led to murky waters. In straining to be hip and smart, his writing started to come across as labored and abstract. After reading a story from this new material in a literary journal, Sheri Martinelli wrote to my father that he was trying too hard to impress other men. I think she was right.
Like many young writers who receive a lot of praise too early in their careers, my father seems to have become paralyzed under the weight of everyone’s expectations. His journals from this period are filled with notes for the book—ironic dialogue (“My personality costs me so much money that I’m obliged to take it seriously”), elaborate metaphors (a character “opens his ego like a newspaper, puts it on in the morning like a necktie, blows his nose in it like a handkerchief”), and telling observations (a small boy’s dog urinates on stacked paintings at an outdoor art show)—but my father never managed to corral all this luster (or bluster) into a cohesive thing. Years later he confided to his friend Michael Vincent Miller that his problem with writing the novel was that he didn’t know how to get his character into and out of a room. There was no way to make that kind of scene setting brilliant or lyrical. And he couldn’t accept the idea that not every sentence had to be special, that he didn’t always have to be special, especially as other peoples’ expectations—and scrutiny—grew.
“Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn” was included in a popular anthology of Beat literature, and my father’s photo ran in Time magazine as a representative of that generation. Arna Bontemps wrote to Langston Hughes, “His picture...makes him look Negroid. If so, he is the only spade among the Beat Generation.”
For my father, trying to write honestly about his childhood without being honest about all its particulars was rather like trying to write one of those lipogram novels that never use the letter e. Reading these drafts, one gets the feeling that everything is disconnected from the “raw data of actuality” and shot through with dead ends. In desperation my father returned to the ground he’d covered in his early stories and tried to mine it again, managing in the process to suck out any remaining vitality, so that even the scenes in his father’s hospital ward lost the sharpness of their tragedy. Rejection letters from literary magazines began piling up. While his publisher remained committed to the novel for almost fifteen years, people in the literary community stopped holding their breath.
According to his notebook, my father planned for the book to end with his father’s death, which represented his final break from the past. While he had trouble achieving this narrative arc on the page, he made progress in real life. An analyst whom my father saw during the mid-1950s tells me about my father’s relationship to a man named Ernest van den Haag, who was a Dutch-born professor of sociology about six years my father’s senior. My dad, in the analyst’s view, came to view Ernest as the ideal father, after he came to terms with how disappointing his own father had been.
While Nat had never shared any of his son’s interests except for boxing—once they’d relived punch for punch the most recent bout, they had nothing left to talk about—Ernest had “a mind as clear as light” and could engage my father in conversation for hours. My dad particularly admired how precisely his friend could express an idea, especially since he’d arrived in the United States in 1940 speaking no English. But my father’s choice of Ernest as a surrogate father seems a rejection of more than his dad’s inarticulateness.
After meeting literally on the street shortly after the end of World War II, my father and Ernest began a daily habit of taking a walk around Greenwich Village. A close friendship soon developed that would last for the next forty-five years. After a few months, my father invited his new friend home to Brooklyn for dinner, where Ernest met my father’s family. “I was somewhat surprised,” Ernest told me before he died in 2002, “because they were all blacks, of course, and Anatole had not warned me of that.”
Despite this omission Ernest never had the sense that my father was conflicted over his identity. “In my recollection he never tried to hide the fact that he was black,” he said. “But he never liked discussing it, because it wasn’t important to him.” For his own part, Ernest said, my father’s racial identity didn’t make any difference to him, which is rather hard to believe given the political positions he’d begun staking out at the time.
In 1956 Ernest published Education as an Industry (an expanded version of his doctoral thesis completed six years earlier), in which he laid out his argument against school integration, claiming it amounted to “compulsory congregation.” The following year Ernest launched the first of a series of attacks on the famous doll tests conducted by the African American sociologist Kenneth Clark, which were cited in the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision as proof that segregation indeed affected the self-esteem of black children. Just as my dad was describing to his analyst why Ernest would have been a better father, his friend was proselytizing about why the races should be kept apart.
For the next two decades, Ernest served as an expert witness against desegregation, appearing before U.S. House and Senate subcommittees and the U.S. Supreme Court. Among his arguments was his conclusion that black children would be more harmed by sitting in the same classrooms as whites, since their historical deprivations meant that they couldn’t measure up. The harmful effects of prolonging this injustice apparently didn’t concern him. For his finale, he testified before the World Court in The Hague about the benefits of apartheid in South Africa for the black population.
When I was growing up, Ernest was a frequent presence in our house, sometimes joining us for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. My brother and I knew him as Uncle Ernest, and it wasn’t until I was eight or nine that I realized he wasn’t actually a blood relation. My father didn’t ignore Ernest’s more difficult traits: his penchant for holding unpopular opinions—he later became a leading proponent for the death penalty—and his general fastidiousness—he tortured my mother with his culinary requirements. But my dad always defended his friendship with his pal, saying that if it weren’t for him, Ernest would have no friends at all. The implication was that once you made a friend, you were stuck with him. Your family, on the other hand, was disposable.
I didn’t learn of Ernest’s racial politics until after both he and my father were dead. I imagine, though, that if I’d had a chance to ask either of them about it, they would have dismissed it as immaterial to their friendship. In my conversations with Ernest, he described my father as his best friend and one of the brightest minds he had ever known. And my father gave the impression of being so secure in his own identity and intelligence (and so uninterested in any questions of race) that he was immune to feeling hurt or influenced by his friend’s antiblack positions.
Yet my father’s adoption of Ernest as an ideal father had to involve some repudiation of himself and his background. And I’m not convinced that Ernest could completely ignore my dad’s racial identity, as he claimed. For starters, when my father proposed to my mother, Ernest tried to exploit my father’s blackness to scare her away. I can’t help feeling sad, and slightly sickened, by the thought that my father would choose such a man to become his—and my—surrogate family. It felt almost as if he had knowingly invited a robber into our house, someone who would rifle through our family albums and keepsakes, stealing and defacing things. But I can also see—from my father’s perhaps unconscious perspective—how Ernest helped to shore up his defenses by providing yet another bulwark against the mixing of whites and blacks. With him in his life, my dad had one more reason to keep the family in his past apart from the one in his future.