Stuff I've been reading and watching

Anatole Broyard, Stax Records, Steve Van Zandt, Bukayo Saka

I think the first time I came across Anatole Broyard’s name was in Priscilla Gilman’s memoir about her father, The Critic’s Daughter, a lovely book about the period in New York’s literary history when it was possible to be a big deal without having written much that the general public would recognise. Richard Gilman, for example, the paternal critic in question, wrote about drama for Newsweek, and that, in the 1970s, was enough for a certain kind of literary fame. Broyard, one of Gilman’s closest friends, was a columnist and essayist; he was also the subject of a famous profile written six years after his death in 1990 by Henry Louis Gates Jr, in which Gates discusses Broyard’s success in disguising his mixed-race heritage. Broyard is perhaps most famous now for being mistakenly thought of as the basis for the character Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. Philip Roth was so exasperated by Wikipedia’s refusal to correct this impression that he wrote an open letter to the website in the New Yorker. Am I a cleverer person for knowing who Broyard and Gilman are? I’m going to say yes. Yes, I am. I wish I knew a little more about economics and nuclear physics than I do about the post-war Greenwich Village scene, but you have to play with the hand you’re dealt. (Is even that true? I don’t know enough about cards, either.)

Broyard pops up again in Cocktails With George and Martha, Philip Gefter’s terrific book about Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf in its theatrical and cinematic forms. He’s quoted twice, and both quotes were sufficiently witty and interesing enough for me to want to seek out his memoir Kafka Was The Rage. “If civilization could be thought of as having a sexuality, art was its sexuality,” he says about the ethos at the New School in the ‘40s. And then, “Psychoanalysis was in the air, like humidity or smoke. You could almost smell it…I wanted to discuss my life not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel.” Who wouldn’t want to check out his memoir?

Richard Gilman appears very early on. Broyard has just moved in with his girlfriend Sheri when Gilman turns up to tell him he was was not the right person for Sheri; Gilman, on the other hand, was, he claimed. It is difficult to see the hold that Sheri exerted on either of them. Her apartment was squalid, and she suggested that Broyard pee on the dirty dishes in the sink rather than schlepping to the bathroom. “But I found it difficult to pee in the sink, because the idea excited me.” So much about the world we live in suggests we have gone backwards, but Kafka Was The Rage offers a small glimmer of hope. We don’t get excited by peeing on dirty dishes in the kitchen sink any more, right? I don’t think we do, anyway, although. I am probably out of touch.