Slow Players # 3: "A Radiance That Does Not Know What to Do With Itself"(Broyard)

Hi:

Yesterday I was doomscrolling (is there any other kind of scrolling to do at this point?) when I found myself through a series of lily pad hops to this blue oasis:

It’s beautiful isn’t it? Two-and-a-half serene minutes of not-quite nothing. ‘Not quite’ because there is of course the cherubic Jim Harrison, a long-haired Tom McGuane swaying on a sun porch, Richard Brautigan looking inscrutable, and naturally all the beautifully humid textures of Key West, Florida in 1973: freaks on bicycles shlepping dogs in baskets, women in hot pants stumbling up Duval Street. In her fantastic, odd guidebook to the Florida Keys—surely the only Fodor’s-style travel guide I have ever been moved to read cover-to-cover, and a surprisingly engrossing read whether one ever intends to go anywhere near the Keys or not—Joy Williams refers to Key West as “a glittering, balmy, perhaps not terribly legitimate rock beneath vast skies,” and you can feel every one of those adjectives as accurate in the clip above. It’s a time and place I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the past few years—Williams’ and McGuane’s Key West, the secret literary center of the seventies—as it’s one I write about in the book I have coming next year, and it seemed worth top-loading this week’s Slow Players with. That sort of serenity is hard to come by right now without chemical assistance, but the trailer to Tarpon provides a brief hit of it. A hit we could all, I suspect, use.

What else could we use at this moment? These past few weeks, if truth be known, I’ve started-and-scrapped a few different editions of this because they didn’t seem right: because the burnished surfaces of a James Salter, say, felt like a questionable, maybe even irresponsible, subject for discussion at a time when the world is burning. Still. I wanted to write about Salter, who remains one of my favorite novelists, as a way of getting to Anatole Broyard, another writer I admire who seems to have been forgotten all over again. Broyard, if you happen to be under thirty-five or so, was a book critic at the New York Times, for a while their daily reviewer (Michiko Kakutani’s predecessor) and later a columnist for the Sunday book section. Like a lot of strong critics—the best ones maybe—Broyard was often aggressively wrong, mean, and given to filing his stupidest opinions into gleaming points. His scathing review of Salter’s Light Years spiked the book, and haunted Salter for years. (Not only did he hate Light Years, he also hated Williams’ The Changeling, and McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade, a trifecta of misjudgment so egregious it’s almost impressive.) But he was also brilliant, insightful—not just about books—and filled with a kind of elan that seems harder to come by these days, when even an enjoyably mean review can feel a bit like the work of a circus performer busking for Twitter faves and an enthusiastic one can feel a little bit . . . dutiful all the same. This is perhaps more a problem of context than it is one of content: the big machine of corporate publishing and that of social media colliding in a dull roar, a roar that can make it even harder to remember that books in fact change lives.

When Broyard is remembered at all these days, it’s largely for a scandal that erupted a few years after his death, when Henry Louis Gates published an essay in the New Yorker that revealed Broyard hadn’t been entirely honest about his racial identity. Born in New Orleans in 1920, Broyard—whose Creole family had moved to Bed-Stuy when he was a kid—spent the entirety of his life, and his esteemed career at the Times, passing as white. Gates’s article is excellent, and paints a sharp, even portrait of the legendarily charismatic Broyard (whose personal magnetism was such that both Chandler Brossard and William Gaddis allegedly based characters on him), but it also speaks only glancingly of Broyard’s writing itself, and not at all of the best thing the critic ever wrote, a memoir of Greenwich Village life in the forties called Kafka Was the Rage.

Kafka Was the Rage is, as you would probably expect a book critic’s memoir to be, a book about other books. Or rather, a book about writers, about the New York City that housed W.H. Auden, Norman Mailer, Anais Nin, and Dwight Macdonald. It’s an incredible portrait of the city, one that might be enthralling to anyone who’s ever been young in New York and/or worked in publishing, but it’s also a book in which Broyard and his friends—Milton Klonsky, Saul Silverman—are so drunk on literature and ambition you’d think it might be exhausting, the way listening to actual twenty-three-year-olds rant about Dostoevsky would be, only—Broyard is funny. Very funny, as one chapter that describes a drunken bedroom tangle with Dylan Thomas and his wife, or another in which Broyard takes the poet Delmore Schwartz to Brooks Brothers to buy a suit (“Delmore had a peculiar walk, like Dr. Caligari in the movie . . . He walked in sputters, in short, manic bursts, like his talk. And he was always bumping into me, because he veered when he walked—when he did anything.”) The book is hilarious and vivid, worth the price of admission for just those short episodes alone, but also, like any good writing that takes literature as its subject, not really about literature at all. It’s about sex, which is where Kafka Was the Rage really pays its dividends. Like Leonard Michaels’ Sylvia—another great book set in the same period and place—Broyard’s memoir is about the erotic confusion, and ferocity, that attended a time when sex wasn’t discussed, or at least whatever public vocabularies were available weren’t up to the task. “Sex in 1947 was like one of those complicated toys that comes disassembled, in one hundred pieces, and without instructions,” Broyard writes. “It would be almost impossible for someone today to understand how far we were from explicit ideas like pleasure or gratification. We were more in the situation of an explorer wondering if the world was flat or round.” In a passage I haven’t been able to shake in the twenty years since I first read it, he writes:

There was a wonderful embarrassment about it all, a moral nakedness. A contemporary writer, a psychotherapist, described embarrassment as radiance that doesn’t know what to do with itself—and that’s what we had. We had radiance. When people are embarrassed, it’s as if they’ve fallen out of their compulsive rhythms and are framed for a moment in an absolute, undefended stillness.

That’s a phenomenal passage for all kinds of reasons, not least for zeroing in on the feeling—embarrassment, shame—that beats beneath all great confessional writing, or maybe all great writing period. And at a time when we are all, every last one of us, a little more locked into our “compulsive rhythms” than usual, doesn’t that seem worth reading?

Broyard’s own story is in many respects a tale of disappointment. After publishing a short story called “What the Cystoscope Said” in 1954, his literary career became an object of frenzied speculation. Editors waved advances at him, and his anticipated novel—a book that never appeared—was expected to vault him to the higher echelons of literary stardom. Instead, he wound up at the Times, and the only books (aside from a few collections that rounded up his columns and reviews) he produced were two late memoirs: Kafka and one entitled Intoxicated by My Illness, which chronicled his grapplings with the prostate cancer to which he succumbed in 1990. That book is good too, and shockingly—almost irrationally—buoyant for a book so bluntly about mortality, but Kafka is his best. And if it is, technically, unfinished—or so the book’s brief postscript, by Broyard’s widow, informs us—it nevertheless ends perfectly, on a note of characteristic erotic exuberance. It’s one of the great portraits of literary New York, and while it went through a period of rediscovery in the mid-nineties, when I first stumbled upon it, not nearly enough people seem to be reading it these days. Perhaps you should?

A radiance that doesn’t know what to do with itself. That’s an oddly hopeful notion, too, at a time when ‘radiance’ feels like it might be in short supply. But of course it isn’t: one sees it in those heat-dazed shots of Key West in the Tarpon trailer above, or even breaking over the rooftops in West Hollywood when I take the dog out in the morning, before I’m fully awake and the news cycle intrudes. It’s always there, and it’s useful now and again to remember as much. To wit, I’ll leave you this time with a playlist that compiles some music that carries the same feeling that trailer does, of light moving across water, and with a promise to be back a little sooner next time.

Oh, and—Salter may have taken Broyard’s review hard, but he certainly managed it with equanimity. As Broyard had taken Salter to task for giving his novel’s characters what he felt were needlessly exotic or pretentious names, Salter wrote the critic a postcard that said simply, Come on. Anatole? May we all meet our adversaries with comparable wit and dexterity.

Until soon,

Matthew