Broyard’s columns were suffused with both worldliness and high culture. Wry, mandarin, even self-amused at times, he wrote like a man about town, but one who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips. Always, he radiated an air of soigné self-confidence: he could be amiable in his opinions or waspish, but he never betrayed a flicker of doubt about what he thought. This was a man who knew that his judgment would never falter and his sentences never fail him.
Grand-Jean knew little about Broyard’s earlier career, but as he rummaged through Broyard’s bookshelves he came across old copies of intellectual journals like Partisan Review and Commentary, to which Broyard had contributed a few pieces in the late forties and early fifties. One day, Grand-Jean found himself leafing through a magazine that contained an early article by Broyard. What caught his eye, though, was the contributor’s note for the article—or, rather, its absence. It had been neatly cut out, as if with a razor.
A few years later, Grand-Jean happened on another copy of that magazine, and decided to look up the Broyard article again. This time, the note on the contributor was intact. It offered a few humdrum details—that Broyard was born in New Orleans, attended Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research, and taught at New York University’s Division of General Education. It also offered a less humdrum one: the situation of the American Negro, the note asserted, was a subject that the author “knows at first hand.” It was an elliptical formulation, to be sure, but for Anatole Broyard it may not have been elliptical enough.
Broyard was born black and became white, and his story is compounded of equal parts pragmatism and principle. He knew that the world was filled with such snippets and scraps of paper, all conspiring to reduce him to an identity that other people had invented and he had no say in. Broyard responded with X-Acto knives and evasions, with distance and denials and half denials and cunning half-truths. Over the years, he became a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation. Some of his acquaintances knew the truth; many more had heard rumors about “distant” black ancestry (wasn’t there a grandfather who was black? a great-grandfather?). But most were entirely unaware, and that was as he preferred it. He kept the truth even from his own children. Society had decreed race to be a matter of natural law, but he wanted race to be an elective affinity, and it was never going to be a fair fight. A penalty was exacted. He shed a past and an identity to become a writer—a writer who wrote endlessly about the act of shedding a past and an identity.
Anatole Paul Broyard was born on July 16, 1920, in New Orleans to Paul Broyard and Edna Miller. His father was a carpenter and worked as a builder, along with his brothers; neither parent had graduated from elementary school. Anatole spent his early years in a modest house on St. Ann Street, in a colored neighborhood in the French Quarter. Documents in the Louisiana state archives show all Anatole’s ancestors, on both sides, to have been Negroes, at least since the late eighteenth century. The rumor about a distant black ancestor was, in a sense, the reverse of the truth: he may have had one distant white ancestor. Of course, the conventions of color stratification within black America—nowhere more pronounced than in New Orleans—meant that light-skinned blacks often intermarried with other light-skinned blacks, and this was the case with Paul and his “high yellow” wife, Edna. Anatole was the second of three children; he and his sister Lorraine, two years older, were light-skinned, while Shirley, two years younger, was not so light-skinned. (The inheritance of melanin is an uneven business.) In any event, the family was identified as Negro, and identified itself as Negro. It was not the most interesting thing about them. But in America it was not a negligible social fact. The year before Anatole’s birth, for example, close to a hundred blacks were lynched in the South and anti-black race riots claimed the lives of hundreds more.
While Anatole was still a child, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, thus joining the great migration that took hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks to Northern cities during the twenties. In the French Quarter, Paul Broyard had been a legendary dancer, beau, and galant; in the French Quarter, the Broyards—Paul was one of ten siblings—were known for their craftsmanship. Brooklyn was a less welcoming environment. “He should never have left New Orleans, but my mother nagged him into it,” Broyard recalled years later. Though Paul Broyard arrived there a master carpenter, he soon discovered that the carpenters’ union was not favorably inclined toward colored applicants. A stranger in a strange city, Paul decided to pass as white in order to join the union and get work. It was strictly a professional decision, which affected his work and nothing else.
For Paul, being colored was a banal fact of life, which might be disguised when convenient; it was not a creed or something to take pride in. Paul did take pride in his craft, and he liked to boast of rescuing projects from know-nothing architects. He filled his home with furniture he had made himself—flawlessly professional, if a little too sturdily built to be stylish. He also took pride in his long legs and his dance-hall agility (an agility Anatole would share). It was a challenge to be a Brooklyn galant, but he did his best.
“Family life was very congenial, it was nice and warm and cozy, but we just didn’t have any sort of cultural or intellectual nourishment at home,” Shirley, who was the only member of the family to graduate from college, recalls. “My parents had no idea even what the New York Times was, let alone being able to imagine that Anatole might write for it.” She says, “Anatole was different from the beginning.” There was a sense, early on, that Anatole Broyard—or Buddy, as he was called then—was not entirely comfortable being a Broyard.
Shirley has a photograph, taken when Anatole was around four or five, of a family visit back to New Orleans. In it you can see Edna and her two daughters, and you can make out Anatole, down the street, facing in the opposite direction. The configuration was, Shirley says, pretty representative. After graduating from Boys High School, in the late thirties, he enrolled in Brooklyn College. Already, he had a passion for modern culture—for European cinema and European literature. The idea that meaning could operate on several levels seemed to appeal to him. Shirley recalls exasperating conversations along those lines: “He’d ask me about a Kafka story I’d read or a French film I’d seen and say, ‘Well, you see that on more than one level, don’t you?’ I felt like saying ‘Oh, get off it.’ Brothers don’t say that to their sisters.”
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Just after the war began, he got married, to a black Puerto Rican woman, Aida, and they soon had a daughter. (He named her Gala, after Salvador Dali’s wife.) Shirley recalls, “He got married and had a child on purpose—the purpose being to stay out of the Army. Then Anatole goes in the Army anyway, in spite of this child.” And his wife and child moved in with the Broyard family.
Though his military records were apparently destroyed in a fire, some people who knew him at this time say that he entered the segregated Army as a white man. If so, he must have relished the irony that after attending officers’ training school he was made the captain of an all-black stevedore battalion. Even then, his thoughts were not far from the new life he envisioned for himself. He said that he joined the Army with a copy of Wallace Stevens in his back pocket; now he was sending money home to his wife and asking her to save it so that he could open a bookstore in the Village when he got back. “She had other ideas,” Shirley notes. “She wanted him to get a nice job, nine to five.”
Between Aida and the allure of a literary life there was not much competition. Soon after his discharge from the Army, at war’s end, he found an apartment in the Village, and he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend evening classes at the New School for Social Research, on Twelfth Street. His new life had no room for Aida and Gala. (Aida, with the child, later moved to California and remarried.) He left other things behind, too. The black scholar and dramatist W. F. Lucas, who knew Buddy Broyard from Bed-Stuy, says, “He was black when he got into the subway in Brooklyn, but as soon as he got out at West Fourth Street he became white.”
He told his sister Lorraine that he had resolved to pass so that he could be a writer, rather than a Negro writer. His darker-skinned younger sister, Shirley, represented a possible snag, of course, but then he and Shirley had never been particularly close, and anyway she was busy with her own life and her own friends. (Shirley graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter College, and went on to marry Franklin Williams, who helped organize the Peace Corps and served as Ambassador to Ghana.) They had drifted apart: it was just a matter of drifting farther apart. Besides, wasn’t that why everybody came to New York—to run away from the confines of family, from places where people thought they knew who and what you were? Whose family wasn’t in some way unsuitable? In a Times column in 1979 Broyard wrote, “My mother and father were too folksy for me, too colorful. . . . Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel. . . . Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity.” Like so much of what he wrote in this vein, it meant more than it said; like the modernist culture he loved, it had levels.
In the Village, where Broyard started a bookstore on Cornelia Street, the salient thing about him wasn’t that he was black but that he was beautiful, charming, and erudite. In those days, the Village was crowded with ambitious and talented young writers and artists, and Broyard—known for calling men “Sport” and girls “Slim”—was never more at home. He could hang out at the San Remo bar with Dwight Macdonald and Delmore Schwartz, and with a younger set who yearned to be the next Macdonalds and the next Schwartzes. Vincent Livelli, a friend of Broyard’s since Brooklyn College days, recalls, “Everybody was so brilliant around us—we kept duelling with each other. But he was the guy that set the pace in the Village.” His conversation sparkled—everybody said so. The sentences came out perfectly formed, festooned with the most apposite literary allusions. His high-beam charm could inspire worship but also resentment. Livelli says, “Anatole had a sort of dancing attitude toward life—he’d dance away from you. He had people understand that he was brilliant and therefore you couldn’t hold him if you weren’t worthy of his attention.”
The novelist and editor Gordon Lish says, “Photographs don’t suggest in any wise the enormous power he had in person. No part of him was ever for a moment at rest.” He adds, “I adored him as a man. I mean, he was really in a league with Neal Cassady as a kind of presence.” But there was, he says, a fundamental difference between Broyard and Kerouac’s inspiration and muse: “Unlike Cassady, who was out of control, Anatole was exorbitantly in control. He was fastidious about managing things.”
Except, perhaps, the sorts of things you’re supposed to manage. His bookstore provided him with entrée to Village intellectuals—and them with entrée to Anatole—yet it was not run as a business, exactly. Its offerings were few but choice: Céline, Kafka, other hard-to-find translations. The critic Richard Gilman, who was one of its patrons, recalls that Broyard had a hard time parting with the inventory: “He had these books on the shelf, and someone would want to buy one, and he would snatch it back.”
Around 1948, Broyard started to attract notice not merely for his charm, his looks, and his conversation but for his published writings. The early pieces, as often as not, were about a subject to which he had privileged access: blacks and black culture. Commentary, in his third appearance in its pages, dubbed him an “anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world.” But was he merely an anthropologist or was he a native informant? It wasn’t an ambiguity that he was in any hurry to resolve. Still, if all criticism is a form of autobiography (as Oscar Wilde would have it), one might look to these pieces for clues to his preoccupations at the time. In a 1950 Commentary article entitled “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” he wrote that the Negro’s embarrassment over blackness should be banished by the realization that “thousands of Negroes with ‘typical’ features are accepted as whites merely because of light complexion.” He continued:
A year later, in “Keep Cool, Man: The Negro Rejection of Jazz,” he wrote, just as despairingly, that the Negro’s
These are words that could be read as self-indictment, if anybody chose to do so. Certainly they reveal a ticklish sense of the perplexities he found himself in, and a degree of self-interrogation (as opposed to self-examination) he seldom displayed again.
In 1950, in a bar near Sheridan Square, Broyard met Anne Bernays, a Barnard junior and the daughter of Edward L. Bernays, who is considered the father of public relations. “There was this guy who was the handsomest man I have ever seen in my life, and I fell madly in love with him,” Bernays, who is best known for such novels as “Growing Up Rich” and “Professor Romeo,” recalls. “He was physically irresistible, and he had this dominating personality, and I guess I needed to be dominated. His hair was so short that you couldn’t tell whether it was curly or straight. He had high cheekbones and very smooth skin.” She knew that he was black, through a mutual friend, the poet and Blake scholar Milton Klonsky. (Years later, in a sort of epiphany, she recognized Anatole’s loping walk as an African-American cultural style: “It was almost as if this were inside him dying to get out and express itself, but he felt he couldn’t do it.”)
After graduation, she got a job as an editor at the literary semiannual Discovery. She persuaded Broyard to submit his work, and in 1954 the magazine ran a short story entitled “What the Cystoscope Said”—an extraordinary account of his father’s terminal illness:
Overnight, Broyard’s renown was raised to a higher level. “Broyard knocked people flat with ‘What the Cystoscope Said,’ ” Lish recalls. One of those people was Burt Britton, a bookseller who later co‑founded Books & Co. In the fifties, he says, he read the works of young American writers religiously: “Now, if writing were a horse race, which God knows it’s not, I would have gone out and put my two bucks down on Broyard.” In “Advertisements for Myself,” Norman Mailer wrote that he’d buy a novel by Broyard the day it appeared. Indeed, Bernays recalls, on the basis of that story the Atlantic Monthly Press offered Broyard a twenty-thousand-dollar advance—then a staggeringly large sum for a literary work by an unknown—for a novel of which “Cystoscope” would be a chapter. “The whole literary world was waiting with bated breath for this great novelist who was about to arrive,” Michael Vincent Miller, a friend of Broyard’s since the late fifties, recalls. “Some feelings of expectation lasted for years.”
Rumor surrounded Broyard like a gentle murmur, and sometimes it became a din. Being an orphan of the avant-garde was hard work. Among the black literati, certainly, his ancestry was a topic of speculation, and when a picture of Broyard accompanied a 1958 Time review of a Beat anthology it was closely scrutinized. Arna Bontemps wrote to Langston Hughes, “His picture . . . makes him look Negroid. If so he is the only spade among the Beat Generation.” Charlie Parker spied Broyard in Washington Square Park one day and told a companion, “He’s one of us, but he doesn’t want to admit he’s one of us.” Richard Gilman recalls an awkwardness that ensued when he stumbled across Anatole with his dark-skinned wife and child: “I just happened to come upon them in a restaurant that was not near our usual stomping grounds. He introduced me, and it was fine, but my sense was that he would rather not have had anyone he knew meet them.” He adds, “I remember thinking at the time that he had the look of an octoroon or a quadroon, one of those—which he strenuously denied. He got into very great disputes with people.”
One of those disputes was with Chandler Brossard, who had been a close friend: Broyard was the best man at Brossard’s wedding. There was a falling out, and Brossard produced an unflattering portrait of Broyard as the hustler and opportunist Henry Porter in his 1952 novel, “Who Walk in Darkness.” Brossard knew just where Broyard was most vulnerable, and he pushed hard. His novel originally began, “People said Henry Porter was a Negro,” and the version published in France still does. Apparently fearing legal action, however, Brossard’s American publisher, New Directions, sent it to Broyard in galley form before it was published.
Anne Bernays was with Broyard when the galleys arrived. Broyard explained to her, “They asked me to read it because they are afraid I am going to sue.” But why would he sue, she wanted to know. “Because it says I’m a Negro,” he replied grimly. “Then,” Bernays recalls, “I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ He said, ‘I am going to make them change it.’ And he did.”
The novel went on to be celebrated as a groundbreaking chronicle of Village hipsters; it also—as a result of the legal redactions—reads rather oddly in places. Henry Porter, the Broyard character, is rumored to be not a Negro but merely “an illegitimate”:
And that, after all, is the nature of such secrets: they are not what cannot be known but what cannot be acknowledged.
Another trip wire seems to have landed Broyard in one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century American fiction, William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” Livelli explains, “Now, around 1947 or ’48, William Gaddis and Anatole were in love with the same gal, Sheri Martinelli. They were rivals, almost at each other’s throats. And Willie was such a sweetheart that he had a mild approach to everything, and Anatole was sort of a stabber: he injected words like poison into conversations.” When “The Recognitions” came out, in 1955, “Anatole caught on to it right away, and he was kind of angry over it.” The Broyard character is named Max, and Gaddis wrote that he “always looked the same, always the same age, his hair always the same short length,” seemingly “a parody on the moment, as his clothes caricatured a past at eastern colleges where he had never been.” Worse is his “unconscionable smile,” which intimates “that the wearer knew all of the dismal secrets of some evil jungle whence he had just come.”
Broyard’s own account of these years—published in 1993 as “Kafka Was the Rage”—is fuelled by the intertwined themes of writing and women. Gaddis says, “His eyes were these great pools—soft, gentle pools. It was girls, girls, girls: a kind of intoxication of its own. I always thought, frankly, that that’s where his career went, his creative energies.”
Anne Bernays maintains, “If you leave the sex part out, you’re only telling half the story. With women, he was just like an alcoholic with booze.” She stopped seeing him in 1952, at her therapist’s urging. “It was like going cold turkey off a drug,” she says, remembering how crushing the experience was, and she adds, “I think most women have an Anatole in their lives.”
Indeed, not a few of them had Anatole. “He was a pussy gangster, really,” Lucas, a former professor of comparative literature, says with Bed-Stuy bluntness. Gilman recalls being in Bergdorf Goodman and coming across Broyard putting the moves on a salesgirl. “I hid behind a pillar—otherwise he’d know that I’d seen him—and watched him go through every stage of seduction: ‘What do you think? Can I put this against you? Oh, it looks great against your skin. You have the most wonderful skin.’ And then he quoted Baudelaire.”
Quoting Baudelaire turns out to be key. Broyard’s great friend Ernest van den Haag recalls trolling the Village with Broyard in those days: “We obviously quite often compared our modus operandi, and what I observed about Anatole is that when he liked a girl he could speak to her brilliantly about all kinds of things which the girl didn’t in the least understand, because Anatole was really vastly erudite. The girl had no idea what he was talking about, but she loved it, because she was under the impression, rightly so, that she was listening to something very interesting and important. His was a solipsistic discourse, in some ways.” Indeed, the narrator of “What the Cystoscope Said” tells of seducing his ailing father’s young and ingenuous nurse in a similar manner:
Broyard recognized that seduction was a matter not only of talking but of listening, too, and he knew how to pay attention with an engulfing level of concentration. The writer Ellen Schwamm, who met Broyard in the late fifties, says, “You show me a man who talks, and I’ll show you a thousand women who hurl themselves at his feet. I don’t mean just talk, I mean dialogues. He listened, and he was willing to speak of things that most men are not interested in: literature and its effect on life.” But she also saw another side to Broyard’s relentless need to seduce. She invokes a formulation made by her husband, the late Harold Brodkey: “Harold used to say that a lot of men steal from women. They steal bits of their souls, bits of their personalities, to construct an emotional life, which many men don’t have. And I think that Anatole needed something of that sort.”
It’s an image of self-assemblage which is very much in keeping with Broyard’s own accounts of himself. Starting in 1946, and continuing at intervals for the rest of his life, he underwent analysis. Yet the word “analysis” is misleading: what he wanted was to be refashioned—or, as he told his first analyst, to be transfigured. “When I came out with the word, I was like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood,” he wrote in the 1993 memoir. “I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel. . . . I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.” He lived a lie because he didn’t want to live a larger lie: and Anatole Broyard, Negro writer, was that larger lie.
Alexandra Nelson, known as Sandy, met Broyard in January of 1961. Broyard was forty, teaching the odd course at the New School and supporting himself by freelancing: promotional copy for publishers, liner notes for Columbia jazz records, blurbs for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Sandy was twenty-three and a dancer, and Broyard had always loved dancers. Of Norwegian descent, she was strikingly beautiful, and strikingly intelligent. Michael Miller recalls, “She represented a certain kind of blonde, a certain kind of sophisticated carnage and a way of moving through the world with a sense of the good things. They both had marvellous taste.”
It was as if a sorcerer had made a list of everything Broyard loved and had given it life. At long last, the conqueror was conquered: in less than a year, Broyard and Sandy were married. Sandy remembers his aura in those days: “Anatole was very hip. It wasn’t a pose—it was in his sinew, in his bones. And, when he was talking to you, you just felt that you were receiving all this radiance from him.” (Van den Haag says, “I do think it’s not without significance that Anatole married a blonde, and about as white as you can get. He may have feared a little bit that the children might turn out black. He must have been pleased that they didn’t.”)
While they were still dating, two of Broyard’s friends told Sandy that he was black, in what seemed to be a clumsy attempt to scare her off. “I think they really weren’t happy to lose him, to see him get into a serious relationship,” she says. “They were losing a playmate, in a way.” Whatever the cultural sanctions, she was unfazed. But she says that when she asked Broyard about it he proved evasive: “He claimed that he wasn’t black, but he talked about ‘island influences,’ or said that he had a grandmother who used to live in a tree on some island in the Caribbean. Anatole was like that—he was very slippery.” Sandy didn’t force the issue, and the succeeding years only fortified his sense of reserve. “Anatole was very strong,” she says. “And he said about certain things, ‘Just keep out. This is the deal if you get mixed up with me.’ ” The life that Broyard chose to live meant that the children did not meet their Aunt Shirley until after his death—nor, except for a couple of brief visits in the sixties, was there any contact even with Broyard’s light-skinned mother and older sister. It was a matter of respecting the ground rules. “I would try to poke in those areas, but the message was very direct and strong,” Sandy explains. “Oh, when I got angry at him, you know, one always pushes the tender points. But over time you grow up about these things and realize you do what you can do and there are certain things you can’t.”
In 1963, just before their first child, Todd, was born, Anatole shocked his friends by another big move—to Connecticut. Not only was he moving to Connecticut but he was going to be commuting to work: for the first time in his life, he would be a company man. “I think one of his claims to fame was that he hadn’t had an office job—somehow, he’d escaped that,” Sandy says. “There had been no real need for him to grow up.” But after Todd was born—a daughter, Bliss, followed in 1966—Anatole spent seven years working full-time as a copywriter at the Manhattan advertising agency Wunderman Ricotta & Kline.
Over the next quarter century, the family lived in a series of eighteenth-century houses, sometimes bought on impulse, in places like Fairfield, Redding, Greens Farms, and Southport. Here, in a land of leaf-blowers and lawnmowers, Bed-Stuy must have seemed almost comically remote. Many of Broyard’s intimates from the late forties knew about his family; the intimates he acquired in the sixties did not, or else had heard only rumors. Each year, the number of people who knew Buddy from Bed-Stuy dwindled; each year, the rumors grew more nebulous; each year, he left his past further behind. Miller says, “Anatole was a master at what Erving Goffman calls ‘impression management.’ ” The writer Evelyn Toynton says, “I remember once going to a party with Sandy and him in Connecticut. There were these rather dull people there, stockbrokers and the usual sorts of people, and Anatole just knocked himself out to charm every single person in the room. I said to him, ‘Anatole, can’t you ever not be charming?’ ” Miller observes, “He was a wonderful host. He could take people from different walks of life—the president of Stanley Tools or a vice-president of Merrill Lynch, say, and some bohemian type from the Village—and keep the whole scene flowing beautifully. He had perfect pitch for the social encounter, like Jay Gatsby.”
It was as if, wedded to an ideal of American self-fashioning, he sought to put himself to the ultimate test. It was one thing to be accepted in the Village, amid the Beats and hipsters and émigrés, but to gain acceptance in Cheever territory was an achievement of a higher order. “Anatole, when he left the Village and went to Connecticut, was able not only to pass but even to be a kind of influential presence in that world of rich white Wasps,” Miller says. “Maybe that was a shallower part of the passing—to be accepted by Connecticut gentry.”
Broyard’s feat raised eyebrows among some of his literary admirers: something borrowed, something new. Daphne Merkin, another longtime friend, detected “a ‘country-squire’ tendency—a complicated tendency to want to establish a sort of safety through bourgeoisness. It was like a Galsworthy quality.”
Even in Arcadia, however, there could be no relaxation of vigilance: in his most intimate relationships, there were guardrails. Broyard once wrote that Michael Miller was one of the people he liked best in the world, and Miller is candid about Broyard’s profound influence on him. Today, Miller is a psychotherapist, based in Cambridge, and the author, most recently, of “Intimate Terrorism.” From the time they met until his death, Broyard read to him the first draft of almost every piece he wrote. Yet a thirty-year friendship of unusual intimacy was circumscribed by a subject that they never discussed. “First of all, I didn’t know,” Miller says. “I just had intuitions and had heard intimations. It was some years before I’d even put together some intuition and little rumblings—nothing ever emerged clearly. There was a certain tacit understanding between us to accept certain pathways as our best selves, and not challenge that too much.” It was perhaps, he says a little sadly, a limitation on the relationship.
In the late sixties, Broyard wrote several front-page reviews for the Times Book Review. “They were brilliant, absolutely sensational,” the novelist Charles Simmons, who was then an assistant editor there, says. In 1971, the Times was casting about for a new daily reviewer, and Simmons was among those who suggested Anatole Broyard. It wasn’t a tough sell. Arthur Gelb, at the time the paper’s cultural editor, recalls, “Anatole was among the first critics I brought to the paper. He was very funny, and he also had that special knack for penetrating hypocrisy. I don’t think he was capable of uttering a boring sentence.”
You could say that his arrival was a sign of the times. Imagine: Anatole Broyard, downtown flaneur and apostle of sex and high modernism, ensconced in what was, literarily speaking, the ultimate establishment perch. “There had been an awful lot of very tame, very conventional people at the Times, and Broyard came in as a sort of ambassador from the Village and Village sophistication,” Alfred Kazin recalls. Broyard had a highly developed appreciation of the paper’s institutional power, and he even managed to use it to avenge wrongs done him in his Village days. Just before he started his job at the daily, he published a review in the Times Book Review of a new novel by one Chandler Brossard. The review began, “Here’s a book so transcendently bad it makes us fear not only for the condition of the novel in this country, but for the country itself.”
Broyard’s reviews were published in alternation with those of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who has now been a daily reviewer at the Times for more than a quarter century, and who readily admits that Broyard’s appointment did not gladden his heart. They hadn’t got along particularly well when Lehmann-Haupt was an editor at the Times Book Review, nor did Lehmann-Haupt entirely approve of Broyard’s status as a fabled libertine. So when A. M. Rosenthal, the paper’s managing editor, was considering hiring him, Lehmann-Haupt expressed reservations. He recalls, “Rosenthal was saying, ‘Give me five reasons why not.’ And I thoughtlessly blurted out, ‘Well, first of all, he is the biggest ass man in town.’ And Rosenthal rose up from his desk and said, ‘If that were a disqualification for working for the New York Times’—and he waved—‘this place would be empty!’ ”
Broyard got off to an impressive start. Lehmann-Haupt says, “He had a wonderful way of setting a tone, and a wonderful way of talking himself through a review. He had good, tough instincts when it came to fiction. He had taste.” And the jovial Herbert Mitgang, who served a stint as a daily reviewer himself, says, “I always thought he was the most literary of the reviewers. There would be something like a little essay in his daily reviews.”
Occasionally, his acerbic opinions got him in trouble. There was, for example, the storm that attended an uncharitable review of a novel by Christy Brown, an Irish writer who was born with severe cerebral palsy. The review concluded:
Then, there was the controversial review of James Baldwin’s piously sentimental novel of black suffering, “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Broyard wrote:
No one could accuse Broyard of proselytizing for progressive causes. Jason Epstein, for one, was quick to detect a neoconservative air in his reviews, and Broyard’s old friend Ernest van den Haag, a longtime contributing editor at National Review, volunteers that he was available to set Broyard straight on the issues when the need arose. Broyard could be mischievous, and he could be tendentious. It did not escape notice that he was consistently hostile to feminist writers. “Perhaps it’s naïve of me to expect people to write reasonable books about emotionally charged subjects,” one such review began, irritably. “But when you have to read and review two or three books each week, you do get tired of ‘understanding’ so much personal bias. You reach a point where it no longer matters that the author’s mistakes are well meant. You don’t care that he or she is on the side of the angels: you just want them to tell the truth.”
Nor did relations between the two daily reviewers ever become altogether cordial. Lehmann-Haupt tells of a time in 1974 when Broyard said that he was sick and couldn’t deliver a review. Lehmann-Haupt had to write an extra review in less than a day, so that he could get to the Ali-Frazier fight the next night, where he had ringside seats. Later, when they discussed the match, Broyard seemed suspiciously knowledgeable about its particulars; he claimed that a friend of his had been invited by a television executive to watch it on closed-circuit TV. “I waited about six months, because one of the charming things about Anatole was that he never remembered his lies,” Lehmann-Haupt says, laughing. “And I said, ‘Did you see that fight?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah—I was there as a guest of this television executive.’ That’s why he couldn’t write the review!”
Broyard had been teaching off and on at the New School since the late fifties, and now his reputation as a writing teacher began to soar. Certainly his fluent prose style, with its combination of grace and clarity, was a considerable recommendation. He was charismatic and magisterial, and, because he was sometimes brutal about students’ work, they found it all the more gratifying when he was complimentary. Among his students were Paul Breslow, Robert Olen Butler, Daphne Merkin, and Hilma Wolitzer. Ellen Schwamm, who took a workshop with him in the early seventies, says, “He had a gourmet’s taste for literature and for language, and he was really able to convey that: it was a very sensual experience.”
These were years of heady success and, at the same time, of a rising sense of failure. An arbiter of American writing, Broyard was racked by his inability to write his own magnum opus. In the fifties, the Atlantic Monthly Press had contracted for an autobiographical novel—the novel that was supposed to secure Broyard’s fame, his place in contemporary literature—but, all these years later, he had made no progress. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Lehmann-Haupt recalls his taking a lengthy vacation in order to get the book written. “I remember talking to him—he was up in Vermont, where somebody had lent him a house—and he was in agony. He banished himself from the Vineyard, was clearly suffering, and he just couldn’t do it.” John Updike, who knew Broyard slightly from the Vineyard, was reminded of the anticipation surrounding Ellison’s second novel: “The most famous non-book around was the one that Broyard was not writing.” (The two non-book writers were in fact quite friendly: Broyard admired Ellison not only as a writer but as a dancer—a high tribute from such an adept as Broyard.)
Surrounded by analysts and psychotherapists—Sandy Broyard had become a therapist herself by this time—Broyard had no shortage of explanations for his inability to write his book. “He did have a total writer’s block,” van den Haag says, “and he was analyzed by various persons, but it didn’t fully overcome the writer’s block. I couldn’t prevent him from going back to ‘The Cystoscope’ and trying to improve it. He made it, of course, not better but worse.” Broyard’s fluency as an essayist and a reviewer wasn’t quite compensation. Charles Simmons says, “He had produced all this charming criticism, but the one thing that mattered to him was the one thing he hadn’t managed to do.”
As the seventies wore on, Miller discussed the matter of blockage with his best friend in relatively abstract terms: he suggested that there might be something in Broyard’s relationship to his family background that was holding him back. In the eighties, he referred Broyard to his own chief mentor in gestalt therapy, Isador From, and From became perhaps Broyard’s most important therapist in his later years. “In gestalt therapy, we talk a lot about ‘unfinished business’: anything that’s incomplete, unfinished, haunts the whole personality and tends, at some level, to create inhibition or blockage,” Miller says. “You’re stuck there at a certain point. It’s like living with a partly full bladder all your life.”
Some people speculated that the reason Broyard couldn’t write his novel was that he was living it—that race loomed larger in his life because it was unacknowledged, that he couldn’t put it behind him because he had put it beneath him. If he had been a different sort of writer, it might not have mattered so much. But Merkin points out, “Anatole’s subject, even in fiction, was essentially himself. I think that ultimately he would have had to deal with more than he wanted to deal with.”
Broyard may have been the picture of serene self-mastery, but there was one subject that could reliably fluster him. Gordon Lish recalls an occasion in the mid-seventies when Burt Britton (who was married to a black woman) alluded to Anatole’s racial ancestry. Lish says, “Anatole became inflamed, and he left the room. He snapped, like a dog snapping—he barked at Britton. It was an ugly moment.” To people who knew nothing about the matter, Broyard’s sensitivities were at times simply perplexing. The critic Judith Dunford used to go to lunch with Broyard in the eighties. One day, Broyard mentioned his sister Shirley, and Dunford, idly making conversation, asked him what she looked like. Suddenly, she saw an extremely worried expression on his face. Very carefully, he replied, “Darker than me.”
There was, finally, no sanctuary. “When the children were older, I began, every eighteen months or so, to bring up the issue of how they needed to know at some point,” Sandy Broyard says. “And then he would totally shut down and go into a rage. He’d say that at some point he would tell them, but he would not tell them now.” He was the Scheherazade of racial imposture, seeking and securing one deferral after another. It must have made things not easier but harder. In the modern era, children are supposed to come out to their parents: it works better that way around. For children, we know, can judge their parents harshly—above all, for what they understand as failures of candor. His children would see the world in terms of authenticity; he saw the world in terms of self-creation. Would they think that he had made a Faustian bargain? Would they speculate about what else he had not told them—about the limits of self-invention? Broyard’s resistance is not hard to fathom. He must have wondered when the past would learn its place, and stay past.
Anatole Broyard had confessed enough in his time to know that confession did nothing for the soul. He preferred to communicate his truths on higher frequencies. As if in exorcism, Broyard’s personal essays deal regularly with the necessary, guilt-ridden endeavor of escaping family history: and yet the feelings involved are well-nigh universal. The thematic elements of passing—fragmentation, alienation, liminality, self-fashioning—echo the great themes of modernism. As a result, he could prepare the way for exposure without ever risking it. Miller observes, “If you look at the writing closely enough, and listen to the intonations, there’s something there that is like no writer from the completely white world. Freud talked about the repetition compulsion. With Anatole, it’s interesting that he was constantly hiding it and in some ways constantly revealing it.”
Sandy speaks of these matters in calmly analytic tones; perhaps because she is a therapist, her love is tempered by an almost professional dispassion. She says, “I think his own personal history continued to be painful to him,” and she adds, “In passing, you cause your family great anguish, but I also think, conversely, do we look at the anguish it causes the person who is passing? Or the anguish that it was born out of?”
It may be tempting to describe Broyard’s self-positioning as arising from a tortured allegiance to some liberal-humanist creed. In fact, the liberal pieties of the day were not much to his taste. “It wasn’t about an ideal of racelessness but something much more complex and interesting,” Miller says. “He was actually quite anti-black,” Evelyn Toynton says. She tells of a time when she was walking with him on a street in New York and a drunken black man came up to him and asked for a dollar. Broyard seethed. Afterward, he remarked to her, “I look around New York, and I think to myself, If there were no blacks in New York, would it really be any loss?”
No doubt this is a calculation that whites, even white liberals, sometimes find themselves idly working out: How many black muggers is one Thelonious Monk worth? How many Willie Hortons does Gwendolyn Brooks redeem? In 1970, Ellison published his classic essay “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” in Time; and one reason it is a classic essay is that it addresses a question that lingers in the American political unconscious. Commanding as Ellison’s arguments are, there remains a whit of defensiveness in the very exercise. It’s a burdensome thing to refute a fantasy.
And a burdensome thing to be privy to it. Ellen Schwamm recalls that one of the houses Broyard had in Connecticut had a black jockey on the lawn, and that “he used to tell me that Jimmy Baldwin had said to him, ‘I can’t come and see you with this crap on your lawn.’ ” (Sandy remembers the lawn jockey—an antique—as having come with the house; she also recalls that it was stolen one day.) Charles Simmons says that the writer Herbert Gold, before introducing him to Broyard, warned him that Broyard was prone to make comments about “spades,” and Broyard did make a few such comments. “He personally, on a deeper level, was not enamored of blacks,” van den Haag says. “He avoided blacks. There is no question he did.” Sandy is gingerly in alluding to this subject. “He was very short-tempered with the behavior of black people, the sort of behavior that was shown in the news. He had paid the price to be at liberty to say things that, if you didn’t know he was black, you would misunderstand. I think it made him ironical.”
Every once in a while, however, Broyard’s irony would slacken, and he would speak of the thing with an unaccustomed and halting forthrightness. Toynton says that after they’d known each other for several years he told her there was a “C” (actually, “col,” for “colored”) on his birth certificate. “And then another time he told me that his sister was black and that she was married to a black man.” The circumlocutions are striking: not that he was black but that his birth certificate was; not that he was black but that his family was. Perhaps this was a matter less of evasiveness than of precision.
“Some shrink had said to him that the reason he didn’t like brown-haired women or dark women was that he was afraid of his own shit,” Toynton continues. “And I said, ‘Anatole, it’s as plain as plain can be that it has to do with being black.’ And he just stopped and said, ‘You don’t know what it was like. It was horrible.’ He told me once that he didn’t like to see his sisters, because they reminded him of his unhappy childhood.” (Shirley’s account suggests that this unhappy childhood may have had more to do with the child than with the hood.)
Ellen Schwamm remembers one occasion when Broyard visited her and Harold Brodkey at their apartment, and read them part of the memoir he was working on. She says that the passages seemed stilted and distant, and that Brodkey said to him, “You’re not telling the truth, and if you try to write lies or evade the truth this is what you get. What’s the real story?” She says, “Anatole took a deep breath and said, ‘The real story is that I’m not who I seem. I’m a black.’ I said, ‘Well, Anatole, it’s no great shock, because this rumor has been around for years and years and years, and everyone assumes there’s a small percentage of you that’s black, if that’s what you’re trying to say.’ And he said, ‘No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. My father could pass, but in fact my mother’s black, too. We’re black as far back as I know.’ We never said a word of it to anybody, because he asked us not to.”
Schwamm also says that she begged him to write about his history: it seemed to her excellent material for a book. But he explained that he didn’t want notoriety based on his race—on his revealing himself to be black—rather than on his talent. As Toynton puts it, Broyard felt that he had to make a choice between being an aesthete and being a Negro. “He felt that once he said, ‘I’m a Negro writer,’ he would have to write about black issues, and Anatole was such an aesthete.”
All the same, Schwamm was impressed by a paradox: the man wanted to be appreciated not for being black but for being a writer, even though his pretending not to be black was stopping him from writing. It was one of the very few ironies that Broyard, the master ironist, was ill equipped to appreciate.
Besides, there was always his day job to attend to. Broyard might suffer through a midnight of the soul in Vermont; but he was also a working journalist, and when it came to filing his copy he nearly always met his deadlines. In the late seventies, he also began publishing brief personal essays in the Times. They are among the finest work he did—easeful, witty, perfectly poised between surface and depth. In them he perfected the feat of being self-revelatory without revealing anything. He wrote about his current life, in Connecticut: “People in New York City have psychotherapists, and people in the suburbs have handymen. While anxiety in the city is existential, in the country it is structural.” And he wrote about his earlier life, in the city: “There was a kind of jazz in my father’s movements, a rhythm compounded of economy and flourishes, functional and decorative. He had a blues song in his blood, a wistful jauntiness he brought with him from New Orleans.” (Wistful, and even worrisome: “I half-expected him to break into the Camel Walk, the Shimmy Shewobble, the Black Bottom or the Mess Around.”) In a 1979 essay he wrote about how much he dreaded family excursions:
These were the themes he returned to in many of his personal essays, seemingly marking out the threshold he would not cross. And if some of his colleagues at the Times knew too much about him, or had heard the rumors, they wouldn’t have dreamed of saying anything. Abe Rosenthal (who did know about him) says that the subject never arose. “What was there to talk about? I didn’t really consider it my business. I didn’t think it was proper or polite, nor did I want him to think I was prejudiced, or anything.”
But most people knew nothing about it. C. Gerald Fraser, a reporter and an editor at the Times from 1967 until 1991, was friendly with Broyard’s brother-in-law Ambassador Franklin Williams. Fraser, who is black, recalls that one day Williams asked him how many black journalists there were at the Times. “I listed them,” he says, “and he said, ‘You forgot one.’ I went over the list again, and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Shirley’s brother, Anatole Broyard.’ I was dumbstruck, because I’d never heard it mentioned at the Times that he was black, or that the paper had a black critic.”
In any event, Broyard’s colleagues did not have to know what he was to have reservations about who he was. He cultivated his image as a trickster—someone who would bend the rules, finesse the system—and that image only intensified his detractors’ ire. “A good book review is an act of seduction, and when he did it there was nobody better,” John Leonard says, but he feels that Broyard’s best was not always offered. “I considered him to be one of the laziest book reviewers to come down the pike.” Soon a running joke was that Broyard would review only novels shorter than two hundred pages. In the introduction to “Aroused by Books,” a collection of the reviews he published in the early seventies, Broyard wrote that he tried to choose books for review that were “closest to [his] feelings.” Lehmann-Haupt says dryly, “We began to suspect that he often picked the books according to the attractiveness of the young female novelists who had written them.” Rosenthal had shamed him for voicing his disquiet about Broyard’s reputation as a Don Juan, but before long Rosenthal himself changed his tune. “Maybe five or six years later,” Lehmann-Haupt recalls, “Rosenthal comes up to me, jabbing me in the chest with a stiffened index finger and saying, ‘The trouble with Broyard is that he writes with his cock!’ I bit my tongue.”
Gradually, a measure of discontent with Broyard’s reviews began to make itself felt among the paper’s cultural commissars. Harvey Shapiro, the editor of the Book Review from 1975 to 1983, recalls conversations with Rosenthal in which “he would tell me that all his friends hated Anatole’s essays, and I would tell him that all my friends loved Anatole’s essays, and that would be the end of the conversation.” In 1984, Broyard was removed from the daily Times and given a column in the Book Review.
Mitchel Levitas, the editor of the Book Review from 1983 to 1989, edited Broyard’s column himself. He says, “It was a tough time for him, you see, because he had come off the daily book review, where he was out there in the public eye twice a week. That was a major change in his public role.” In addition to writing his column, he was put to work as an editor at the Book Review. The office environment was perhaps not altogether congenial to a man of his temperament. Kazin recalls, “He complained to me constantly about being on the Book Review, because he had to check people’s quotations and such. I think he thought that he was superior to the job.”
Then, too, it was an era in which the very notion of passing was beginning to seem less plangent than preposterous. Certainly Broyard’s skittishness around the subject wasn’t to everyone’s liking. Brent Staples, who is black, was an editor at the Book Review at the time Broyard was there “Anatole had it both ways,” Staples says. “He would give you a kind of burlesque wink that seemed to indicate he was ready to accept the fact of your knowing that he was a black person. It was a real ambiguity, tacit and sort of recessed. He jived around and played with it a lot, but never made it express the fact that he was black.” It was a game that tried Staples’ patience. “When Anatole came anywhere near me, for example, his whole style, demeanor, and tone would change,” he recalls. “I took that as him conveying to me, ‘Yes, I am like you. But I’m relating this to you on a kind of recondite channel.’ Over all, it made me angry. Here was a guy who was, for a long period of time, probably one of the two or three most important critical voices on literature in the United States. How could you, actively or passively, have this fact hidden?”
Staples pauses, then says, “You know, he turned it into a joke. And when you change something basic about yourself into a joke, it spreads, it metastasizes, and so his whole presentation of self became completely ironic. Everything about him was ironic.”
There were some people who came to have a professional interest in achieving a measure of clarity on the topic. Not long before Broyard retired from the Times, in 1989, Daphne Merkin, as an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, gave him an advance of a hundred thousand dollars for his memoirs. (The completed portion was ultimately published, as “Kafka Was the Rage,” by Crown.) Merkin learned that “he was, in some ways, opaque to himself,” and her disquiet grew when the early chapters arrived. “I said, ‘Anatole, there’s something odd here. Within the memoir, you have your family moving to a black neighborhood in Brooklyn. I find that strange—unless they’re black.’ I said, ‘You can do many things if you’re writing a memoir. But if you squelch stuff that seems to be crucial about you, and pretend it doesn’t exist . . .’ ” She observes that he was much attached to aspects of his childhood, but “in a clouded way.”
When Broyard retired from the Times, he was nearly sixty-nine. To Sandy, it was a source of some anguish that their children still did not know the truth about him. Yet what was that truth? Broyard was a critic—a critic who specialized in European and American fiction. And what was race but a European and American fiction? If he was passing for white, perhaps he understood that the alternative was passing for black. “But if some people are light enough to live like white, mother, why should there be such a fuss?” a girl asks her mother in “Near-White,” a 1931 story by the Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay. “Why should they live colored when they could be happier living white?” Why, indeed? One could concede that the passing of Anatole Broyard involved dishonesty; but is it so very clear that the dishonesty was mostly Broyard’s?
To pass is to sin against authenticity, and “authenticity” is among the founding lies of the modern age. The philosopher Charles Taylor summarizes its ideology thus: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.” And the Romantic fallacy of authenticity is only compounded when it is collectivized: when the putative real me gives way to the real us. You can say that Anatole Broyard was (by any juridical reckoning) “really” a Negro, without conceding that a Negro is a thing you can really be. The vagaries of racial identity were increased by what anthropologists call the rule of “hypodescent”—the one-drop rule. When those of mixed ancestry—and the majority of blacks are of mixed ancestry—disappear into the white majority, they are traditionally accused of running from their “blackness.” Yet why isn’t the alternative a matter of running from their “whiteness”? To emphasize these perversities, however, is a distraction from a larger perversity. You can’t get race “right” by refining the boundary conditions.
The act of razoring out your contributor’s note may be quixotic, but it is not mad. The mistake is to assume that birth certificates and biographical sketches and all the other documents generated by the modern bureaucratic state reveal an anterior truth—that they are merely signs of an independently existing identity. But in fact they constitute it. The social meaning of race is established by these identity papers—by tracts and treatises and certificates and pamphlets and all the other verbal artifacts that proclaim race to be real and, by that proclamation, make it so.
So here is a man who passed for white because he wanted to be a writer, and he did not want to be a Negro writer. It is a crass disjunction, but it is not his crassness or his disjunction. His perception was perfectly correct. He would have had to be a Negro writer, which was something he did not want to be. In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy. We give lip service to the idea of the writer who happens to be black, but had anyone, in the postwar era, ever seen such a thing?
Broyard’s friend Richard A. Shweder, an anthropologist and a theorist of culture, says, “I think he believed that reality is constituted by style,” and ascribes to Broyard a “deeply romantic view of the intimate connection between style and reality.” Broyard passed not because he thought that race wasn’t important but because he knew that it was. The durable social facts of race were beyond reason, and, like Paul Broyard’s furniture, their strength came at the expense of style. Anatole Broyard lived in a world where race had, indeed, become a trope for indelibility, for permanence. “All I have to do,” a black folk saying has it, “is stay black and die.”
Broyard was a connoisseur of the liminal—of crossing over and, in the familiar phrase, getting over. But the ideologies of modernity have a kicker, which is that they permit no exit. Racial recusal is a forlorn hope. In a system where whiteness is the default, racelessness is never a possibility. You cannot opt out; you can only opt in. In a scathing review of a now forgotten black author, Broyard announced that it was time to reconsider the assumption of many black writers that “ ‘whitey’ will never let you forget you’re black.” For his part, he wasn’t taking any chances. At a certain point, he seems to have decided that all he had to do was stay white and die.
In 1989, Broyard resolved that he and his wife would change their life once more. With both their children grown, they could do what they pleased. And what they pleased—what he pleased, anyway—was to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts. They would be near Harvard, and so part of an intellectual community. He had a vision of walking through Harvard Square, bumping into people like the sociologist Daniel Bell, and having conversations about ideas in the street. Besides, his close friend Michael Miller was living in the area. Anne Bernays, also a Cambridge resident, says, “I remember his calling several times and asking me about neighborhoods. It was important for him to get that right. I think he was a little disappointed when he moved that it wasn’t to a fancy neighborhood like Brattle or Channing Street. He was on Wendell Street, where there’s a tennis court across the street and an apartment building and the houses are fairly close together.” It wasn’t a matter of passing so much as of positioning.
Sandy says that they had another the-children-must-be-told conversation shortly before the move. “We were driving to Michael’s fiftieth-birthday party—I used to plan to bring up the subject in a place where he couldn’t walk out. I brought it up then because at that point our son was out of college and our daughter had just graduated, and my feeling was that they just absolutely needed to know, as adults.” She pauses. “And we had words. He would just bring down this gate.” Sandy surmises, again, that he may have wanted to protect them from what he had experienced as a child. “Also,” she says, “I think he needed still to protect himself.” The day after they moved into their house on Wendell Street, Broyard learned that he had prostate cancer, and that it was inoperable.
Broyard spent much of the time before his death, fourteen months later, making a study of the literature of illness and death, and publishing a number of essays on the subject. Despite the occasion, they were imbued with an almost dandyish, even jokey sense of incongruity: “My urologist, who is quite famous, wanted to cut off my testicles. . . . Speaking as a surgeon, he said that it was the surest, quickest, neatest solution. Too neat, I said, picturing myself with no balls. I knew that such a solution would depress me, and I was sure that depression is bad medicine.” He had attracted notice in 1954 with the account of his father’s death from a similar cancer; now he recharged his writing career as a chronicler of his own progress toward death. He thought about calling his collection of writings on the subject “Critically Ill.” It was a pun he delighted in.
Soon after the diagnosis was made, he was told that he might have “in the neighborhood of years.” Eight months later, it became clear that this prognosis was too optimistic. Richard Shweder, the anthropologist, talks about a trip to France that he and his wife made with Anatole and Sandy not long before Anatole’s death. One day, the two men were left alone. Shweder says, “And what did he want to do? He wanted to throw a ball. The two of us just played catch, back and forth.” The moment, he believes, captures Broyard’s athleticism, his love of physical grace.
Broyard spent the last five weeks of his life at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston. In therapy sessions, the need to set things straight before the end had come up again—the need to deal with unfinished business and, most of all, with his secret. He appeared willing, if reluctant, to do so. But by now he was in almost constant pain, and the two children lived in different places, so the opportunities to have the discussion as a family were limited. “Anatole was in such physical pain that I don’t think he had the wherewithal,” Sandy says. “So he missed the opportunity to tell the children himself.” She speaks of the expense of spirit, of psychic energy, that would have been required. The challenge would have been to explain why it had remained a secret. And no doubt the old anxieties were not easily dispelled: would it have been condemned as a Faustian bargain or understood as a case of personality overspilling, or rebelling against, the reign of category?
It pains Sandy even now that the children never had the chance to have an open discussion with their father. In the event, she felt that they needed to know before he died, and, for the first time, she took it upon herself to declare what her husband could not. It was an early afternoon, ten days before his death, when she sat down with her two children on a patch of grass across the street from the institute. “They knew there was a family secret, and they wanted to know what their father had to tell them. And I told them.”
The stillness of the afternoon was undisturbed. She says carefully, “Their first reaction was relief that it was only this, and not an event or circumstance of larger proportions. Only following their father’s death did they begin to feel the loss of not having known. And of having to reformulate who it was that they understood their father—and themselves—to be.”
At this stage of his illness, Anatole was moving in and out of lucidity, but in his room Sandy and the children talked with humor and irony about secrets and about this particular secret. Even if Anatole could not participate in the conversation, he could at least listen to it. “The nurses said that hearing was the last sense to go,” Sandy says.
It was not as she would have planned it. She says, gently, “Anatole always found his own way through things.”
The writer Leslie Garis, a friend of the Broyards’ from Connecticut, was in Broyard’s room during the last weekend of September, 1990, and recorded much of what he said on his last day of something like sentience. He weighed perhaps seventy pounds, she guessed, and she describes his jaundice-clouded eyes as having the permanently startled look born of emaciation. He was partly lucid, mostly not. There are glimpses of his usual wit, but in a mode more aleatoric than logical. He spoke of Robert Graves, of Sheri Martinelli, of John Hawkes interpreting Miles Davis. He told Sandy that he needed to find a place to go where he could “protect his irony.” As if, having been protected by irony throughout his life, it was now time to return the favor.
“I think friends are coming, so I think we ought to order some food,” he announced hours before he lapsed into his final coma. “We’ll want cheese and crackers, and Faust.”
“Faust?” Sandy asked.
Anatole explained, “He’s the kind of guy who makes the Faustian bargain, and who can be happy only when the thing is revealed.”
Amemorial service, held at a Congregationalist church in Connecticut, featured august figures from literary New York, colleagues from the Times, and neighbors and friends from the Village and the Vineyard. Charles Simmons told me that he was surprised at how hard he took Broyard’s death. “You felt that you were going to have him forever, the way you feel about your own child,” he said. “There was something wrong about his dying, and that was the reason.” Speaking of the memorial service, he says, marvelling, “You think that you’re the close friend, you know? And then I realized that there were twenty people ahead of me. And that his genius was for close friends.”
Indeed, six years after Broyard’s death many of his friends seem to be still mourning his loss. For them he was plainly a vital principle, a dancer and romancer, a seducer of men and women. (He considered seduction, he wrote, “the most heartfelt literature of the self.”) Sandy tells me, simply, “You felt more alive in his presence,” and I’ve heard almost precisely the same words from a great many others. They felt that he lived more intensely than other men. They loved him—perhaps his male friends especially, or, anyway, more volubly—and they admired him. They speak of a limber beauty, of agelessness, of a radiance. They also speak of his excesses and his penchant for poses. Perhaps, as the bard has it, Broyard was “much more the better for being a little bad.”
And if his presence in American fiction was pretty much limited to other people’s novels, that is no small tribute to his personal vibrancy. You find him reflected and refracted in the books of his peers, like Anne Bernays (she says there is a Broyard character in every novel she’s written) and Brossard and Gaddis, of course, but also in those of his students. His own great gift was as a feuilletonist. The personal essays collected in “Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes” can put you in mind of “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. They are brief impromptus, tonally flawless. To read them is to feel that you are in the company of someone who is thinking things through. The essays are often urbane and sophisticated, but not unbearably so, and they can be unexpectedly moving. Literary culture still fetishizes the novel, and there he was perhaps out of step with his times. Sandy says, “In the seventies and eighties, the trend, in literature and film, was to get sparer, and the flourish of Anatole’s voice was dependent on the luxuriance of his language.” Richard Shweder says, “It does seem that Anatole’s strength was the brief, witty remark. It was aphoristic. It was the critical review. He was brilliant in a thousand or two thousand words.” Perhaps he wasn’t destined to be a novelist, but what of it? Broyard was a Negro who wanted to be something other than a Negro, a critic who wanted to be something other than a critic. Broyard, you might say, wanted to be something other than Broyard. He very nearly succeeded.
Shirley Broyard Williams came to his memorial service, and many of his friends—including Alfred Kazin, who delivered one of the eulogies—remember being puzzled and then astonished as they realized that Anatole Broyard was black. For Todd and Bliss, however, meeting Aunt Shirley was, at last, a flesh-and-blood confirmation of what they had been told. Shirley is sorry that they didn’t meet sooner, and she remains baffled about her brother’s decision. But she isn’t bitter about it; her attitude is that she has had a full and eventful life of her own—husband, kids, friends—and that if her brother wanted to keep himself aloof she respected his decision. She describes the conversations they had when they did speak: “They always had to be focussed on something, like a movie, because you couldn’t afford to be very intimate. There had to be something that would get in the way of the intimacy.” And when she phoned him during his illness it was the same way. “He never gave that up,” she says, sounding more wistful than reproachful. “He never learned how to be comfortable with me.” So it has been a trying set of circumstances all around. “The hypocrisy that surrounds this issue is so thick you could chew it,” Shirley says wearily.
Shirley’s husband died several months before Anatole, and I think she must have found it cheering to be able to meet family members who had been sequestered from her. She says that she wants to get to know her nephew and her niece—that there’s a lot of time to make up. “I’ve been encouraging Bliss to come and talk, and we had lunch, and she calls me on the phone. She’s really responded very well. Considering that it’s sort of last-minute.”
Years earlier, in an essay entitled “Growing Up Irrational,” Anatole Broyard wrote, “I descended from my mother and father. I was extracted from them.” His parents were “a conspiracy, a plot against society,” as he saw it, but also a source of profound embarrassment. “Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I could understand how much I missed them and what they meant to me. When they went into the flames at the crematorium, all my letters of introduction went with them.” Now that he had a wife and family of his own, he had started to worry about whether his children’s feelings about him would reprise his feelings about his parents: “Am I an embarrassment to them, or an accepted part of the human comedy? Have they joined my conspiracy, or are they just pretending? Do they understand that, after all those years of running away from home, I am still trying to get back?” ♦
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