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iRsSlw"><a class="RubricLk-gRWSOU fgWnkQ bric__lk" href="/magaze/life-and-letters"><span class="RubricName-fVtemz cLxcNi">Life and Letters</span></a></div></div></div><h1 data-ttid="ContentHearHed" class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ ContentHearHed-NCyCC iUEiRd NbxED hpJvIc">Whe Like Me</h1></div><div class="ContentHearAccredatn-lfctVB enhwXT ntent-hear__accredatn" data-ttid="ContentHearAccredatn"><div class="ContentHearDek-bIqFFZ Mtme">Anatole Broyard wanted to be a wrer, not a black wrer. So he chose to live a lie rather than be trapped by the tth.</div><div class="ContentHearByle-kmPyCa gvUmxJ"><div class="ContentHearByleContent-dpPmNn DRFq"><div data-ttid="BylWrapper" class="BylWrapper-KIudk irTIfE byl ContentHearByl-cZqgyJ bqbBYQ"><p class="ByleWrapper-jWHrLH ivtvgj byle byl__byle" data-ttid="ByleWrapper" emProp="thor" emType="><span emProp="name" class="ByleNamWrapper-jbHncj fuDQVo"><span data-ttid="ByleName" class="ByleName-kwmrLn cYaBaU byle__name"><span class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ BylePreamble-iJolpQ iUEiRd jslZfG gnILss byle__preamble">By </span><a class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ BaseLk-eNWuiM ByleLk-gEnFiw iUEiRd ggMZaT cXqSTL eErqIx byle__name-lk button" href="/ntributors/henry-louis-gat">Henry Louis Gat, Jr.</a></span></span></p></div><time data-ttid="ContentHearPublishDate" dateTime="1996-06-10T05:00:00-04:00" class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ ContentHearPublishDate-eIBicG iUEiRd kYZrFA kEBrdf">June 10, 1996</time></div></div></div></div></div></hear></div><div data-attribute-verso-pattern="article-body" class="ArticlePageContentBackGround-cNiFNN kbAoLA article-body__ntent"><div class="ActnBarWrapperContent-lasBkU cAHp"><div class="ActnBarWrapperComponent-cjwxLS bEeSLb"><div data-attr-viewport-monor="" class="ActnBarWrapper-dhxmQh kNjTbQ viewport-monor-anchor"><button id="bookmark" aria-label="Save this story" class="ActnBarButton-dyFOZU hQrwCF bookmark large-screen"><span class="ActnBarSendaryButtonPrimaryIn-isbvyN cAwccV bookmark-button-in"><svg class="in in-bookmark" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" xmlns="><tle>Save this story</tle><path class="in-bookmark-fill" d="M20 23.9508L12.5 19.7312L5 23.9508V2.95081H14V3.93211H6V22.1845L12.5 18.5536L19 22.1845V8.83866H20V23.9508Z"></path><path class="in-bookmark-fill" d="M23 3H20V0H19V3H16V4H19V7H20V4H23V3Z"></path></svg></span><span class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ ActnBarButtonText-bYXYuh iUEiRd bkefvo gkccfO">Save this story</span></button></div><div data-attr-viewport-monor="" class="ActnBarWrapper-dhxmQh kAEsuD viewport-monor-anchor"><button id="bookmark" aria-label="Save this story" class="ActnBarButton-dyFOZU cjjxgx bookmark mobile"><span class="ActnBarSendaryButtonPrimaryIn-isbvyN cAwccV bookmark-button-in"><svg class="in in-bookmark" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" xmlns="><tle>Save this story</tle><path class="in-bookmark-fill" d="M20 23.9508L12.5 19.7312L5 23.9508V2.95081H14V3.93211H6V22.1845L12.5 18.5536L19 22.1845V8.83866H20V23.9508Z"></path><path class="in-bookmark-fill" d="M23 3H20V0H19V3H16V4H19V7H20V4H23V3Z"></path></svg></span><span class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ ActnBarButtonText-bYXYuh iUEiRd bkefvo gkccfO">Save this story</span></button></div></div></div><div class="LightboxWrapper-dxsWBV hhylRt"><div class="ArticlePageChunksContent-etcMtP bwyLBj"><div data-ttid="ArticlePageChunks" class="ArticlePageChunks-fLyCVG gBDqlf"><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><div class="GenericCalloutWrapper-tojWn iHBnEl llout--has-top-borr set-embedd-le" data-ttid="GenericCallout"><figure class="AssetEmbedWrapper-eVDQiB byBkf asset-embed"><div class="AssetEmbedAssetContaer-eJxoAx dBHGoQ asset-embed__asset-ntaer"><span class="SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB rponsive-asset AssetEmbedRponsiveAsset-cXBNxi eCxVQK asset-embed__rponsive-asset"><picture class="RponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO KhjZz AssetEmbedRponsiveAsset-cXBNxi eCxVQK asset-embed__rponsive-asset rponsive-image rponsive-image--expandable"><noscript><img alt="Anatole Broyard" class="RponsiveImageContaer-eybHBd fptoWY rponsive-image__image" src=" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w, 640w, 960w, 1280w, 1600w, 1920w, 2240w" siz="100vw"/></noscript></picture></span></div><div class="CaptnWrapper-jSZdqE iTuhkZ ptn AssetEmbedCaptn-fNQBPI fmQnYP asset-embed__ptn"><span class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ CaptnText-bHjzlu iUEiRd hWyo iXWezO ptn__text">Anatole Broyard, date unknown.</span><span class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ CaptnCred-ejegDm iUEiRd iicloT jbIJNS ptn__cred">Photograph urty The New School Archiv and Special Collectns / The New School</span></div></figure></div><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg">In 1982, an vtment banker named Richard Grand-Jean took a summer’s lease on an eighteenth-century farmhoe Fairfield, Connecticut; s owner, Anatole Broyard, spent his summers Martha’s Veyard. The hoe was handsomely furnished wh perd antiqu, and the surroundg acreage clud a swimmg pool and a pond. But the property had another attractn, too. Grand-Jean, a managg director of Salomon Brothers, was an avid rear, and he took satisfactn rentg om so illtr a figure. Anatole Broyard had by then been a daily book reviewer for the <em>Tim</em> for more than a , and that meant that he was one of lerary Ameri’s foremost gatekeepers. Grand-Jean might turn to the bs pag of the <em>Tim</em> first, out of profsnal obligatn, but he turned to the book page next, out of a sense of self. In his Walter Mtyish moments, he sometim imaged what might be like to be someone who read and wrote about books for a livg—someone to whom lns of rears looked for guidance.</p><p class="paywall">Broyard’s lumns were suffed wh both worldls and high culture. Wry, mandar, even self-amed at tim, he wrote like a man about town, but one who jt happened to have all of Wtern lerature at his fgertips. Always, he radiated an air of soigné self-nfince: he uld be amiable his opns 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 sentenc never fail him.</p><p class="paywall">Grand-Jean knew ltle about Broyard’s earlier reer, but as he mmaged through Broyard’s bookshelv he me across old pi of tellectual journals like <em>Partisan Review</em> and <em>Commentary</em>, to which Broyard had ntributed a few piec the late forti and early fifti. One day, Grand-Jean found himself leafg through a magaze that ntaed an early article by Broyard. What ught his eye, though, was the ntributor’s note for the article—or, rather, s absence. It had been neatly cut out, as if wh a razor.</p><p class="paywall">A few years later, Grand-Jean happened on another py of that magaze, and cid to look up the Broyard article aga. This time, the note on the ntributor was tact. It offered a few humdm tails—that Broyard was born New Orleans, attend Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Rearch, and tght at New York Universy’s Divisn of General Edutn. It also offered a ls humdm one: the suatn of the Amerin Negro, the note asserted, was a subject that the thor “knows at first hand.” It was an elliptil formulatn, to be sure, but for Anatole Broyard may not have been elliptil enough.</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">Broyard was born black and beme whe, and his story is pound of equal parts pragmatism and prciple. He knew that the world was filled wh such snippets and scraps of paper, all nspirg to rce him to an inty that other people had vented and he had no say . Broyard rpond wh X-Acto kniv and evasns, wh distance and nials and half nials and cunng half-tths. Over the years, he beme a virtuoso of ambiguy and equivotn. Some of his acquatanc knew the tth; many more had heard mors about “distant” black anctry (wasn’t there a grandfather who was black? a great-grandfather?). But most were entirely unaware, and that was as he preferred . He kept the tth even om his own children. Society had creed race to be a matter of natural law, but he wanted race to be an elective affy, and was never gog to be a fair fight. A penalty was exacted. He shed a past and an inty to bee a wrer—a wrer who wrote endlsly about the act of sheddg a past and an inty.</p><p class="paywall">Anatole Pl Broyard was born on July 16, 1920, New Orleans to Pl Broyard and Edna Miller. His father was a rpenter and worked as a builr, along wh his brothers; neher parent had graduated om elementary school. Anatole spent his early years a most hoe on St. Ann Street, a lored neighborhood the French Quarter. Documents the Louisiana state archiv show all Anatole’s anctors, on both sis, to have been Negro, at least sce the late eighteenth century. The mor about a distant black anctor was, a sense, the reverse of the tth: he may have had one distant whe anctor. Of urse, the nventns of lor stratifitn wh black Ameri—nowhere more pronounced than New Orleans—meant that light-skned blacks often termarried wh other light-skned blacks, and this was the se wh Pl and his “high yellow” wife, Edna. Anatole was the send of three children; he and his sister Lorrae, two years olr, were light-skned, while Shirley, two years younger, was not so light-skned. (The herance of melan is an uneven bs.) In any event, the fay was intified as Negro, and intified self as Negro. It was not the most tertg thg about them. But Ameri was not a negligible social fact. The year before Anatole’s birth, for example, close to a hundred blacks were lynched the South and anti-black race rts claimed the liv of hundreds more.</p><p class="paywall">While Anatole was still a child, the fay moved to the Bedford-Stuyvant area of Brooklyn, th jog the great migratn that took hundreds of thoands of Southern blacks to Northern ci durg the twenti. In the French Quarter, Pl Broyard had been a legendary dancer, be, and <em>galant</em>; the French Quarter, the Broyards—Pl was one of ten siblgs—were known for their craftsmanship. Brooklyn was a ls welg environment. “He should never have left New Orleans, but my mother nagged him to ,” Broyard relled years later. Though Pl Broyard arrived there a master rpenter, he soon disvered that the rpenters’ unn was not favorably cled toward lored applints. A stranger a strange cy, Pl cid to pass as whe orr to jo the unn and get work. It was strictly a profsnal cisn, which affected his work and nothg else.</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-1 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">For Pl, beg lored was a banal fact of life, which might be disguised when nvenient; was not a creed or somethg to take pri . Pl did take pri his craft, and he liked to boast of rcug projects om know-nothg archects. He filled his home wh furnure he had ma himself—flawlsly profsnal, if a ltle too sturdily built to be stylish. He also took pri his long legs and his dance-hall agily (an agily Anatole would share). It was a challenge to be a Brooklyn <em>galant</em>, but he did his bt.</p><p class="paywall">“Fay life was very ngenial, was nice and warm and zy, but we jt didn’t have any sort of cultural or tellectual nourishment at home,” Shirley, who was the only member of the fay to graduate om llege, rells. “My parents had no ia even what the New York <em>Tim</em> was, let alone beg able to image that Anatole might wre for .” She says, “Anatole was different om the begng.” There was a sense, early on, that Anatole Broyard—or Buddy, as he was lled then—was not entirely fortable beg a Broyard.</p><p class="paywall">Shirley has a photograph, taken when Anatole was around four or five, of a fay vis back to New Orleans. In you n see Edna and her two dghters, and you n make out Anatole, down the street, facg the oppose directn. The nfiguratn was, Shirley says, pretty reprentative. After graduatg om Boys High School, the late thirti, he enrolled Brooklyn College. Already, he had a passn for morn culture—for European cema and European lerature. The ia that meang uld operate on several levels seemed to appeal to him. Shirley rells exasperatg nversatns along those l: “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 sayg ‘Oh, get off .’ Brothers don’t say that to their sisters.”</p><div class="Contaer-bkChBi byNLHx"></div><p class="paywall">Jt after the war began, he got married, to a black Puerto Rin woman, Aida, and they soon had a dghter. (He named her Gala, after Salvador Dali’s wife.) Shirley rells, “He got married and had a child on purpose—the purpose beg to stay out of the Army. Then Anatole go the Army anyway, spe of this child.” And his wife and child moved wh the Broyard fay.</p><p class="paywall">Though his ary rerds were apparently stroyed a fire, some people who knew him at this time say that he entered the segregated Army as a whe man. If so, he mt have relished the irony that after attendg officers’ trag school he was ma the pta of an all-black stevedore battaln. Even then, his thoughts were not far om the new life he envisned for himself. He said that he joed the Army wh a py of Wallace Stevens his back pocket; now he was sendg money home to his wife and askg her to save so that he uld open a bookstore the Village when he got back. “She had other ias,” Shirley not. “She wanted him to get a nice job, ne to five.”</p><p class="paywall">Between Aida and the allure of a lerary life there was not much petn. Soon after his discharge om the Army, at war’s end, he found an apartment the Village, and he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend eveng class at the New School for Social Rearch, on Twelfth Street. His new life had no room for Aida and Gala. (Aida, wh the child, later moved to California and remarried.) He left other thgs behd, too. The black scholar and dramatist W. F. Lus, who knew Buddy Broyard om Bed-Stuy, says, “He was black when he got to the subway Brooklyn, but as soon as he got out at Wt Fourth Street he beme whe.”</p><div><div class="ConsumerMarketgUnThemedWrapper-iUTMTf jssHut nsumer-marketg-un nsumer-marketg-un--article-mid-ntent" role="prentatn" aria-hidn="te"><div class="nsumer-marketg-un__slot nsumer-marketg-un__slot--article-mid-ntent nsumer-marketg-un__slot---ntent"></div><div class="journey-un"></div></div></div><p class="paywall">He told his sister Lorrae that he had rolved to pass so that he uld be a wrer, rather than a Negro wrer. His darker-skned younger sister, Shirley, reprented a possible snag, of urse, but then he and Shirley had never been particularly close, and anyway she was by wh her own life and her own iends. (Shirley graduated Phi Beta Kappa om Hunter College, and went on to marry Frankl Williams, who helped anize the Peace Corps and served as Ambassador to Ghana.) They had drifted apart: was jt a matter of driftg farther apart. Bis, wasn’t that why everybody me to New York—to n away om the nf of fay, om plac where people thought they knew who and what you were? Whose fay <em>wasn’t</em> some way unsuable? In a <em>Tim</em> lumn 1979 Broyard wrote, “My mother and father were too folksy for me, too lorful. . . . Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had spng om their own brows, or om the pag of a bad novel. . . . Orphans of the avant-gar, we outdistanced our history and our humany.” Like so much of what he wrote this ve, meant more than said; like the mornist culture he loved, had levels.</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">In the Village, where Broyard started a bookstore on Cornelia Street, the salient thg about him wasn’t that he was black but that he was betiful, charmg, and ede. In those days, the Village was crowd wh amb and talented young wrers and artists, and Broyard—known for llg men “Sport” and girls “Slim”—was never more at home. He uld hang out at the San Remo bar wh Dwight Macdonald and Delmore Schwartz, and wh a younger set who yearned to be the next Macdonalds and the next Schwartz. Vcent Livelli, a iend of Broyard’s sce Brooklyn College days, rells, “Everybody was so brilliant around —we kept duellg wh each other. But he was the guy that set the pace the Village.” His nversatn sparkled—everybody said so. The sentenc me out perfectly formed, ftooned wh the most appose lerary allns. His high-beam charm uld spire worship but also rentment. Livelli says, “Anatole had a sort of dancg attu toward life—he’d dance away om you. He had people unrstand that he was brilliant and therefore you uldn’t hold him if you weren’t worthy of his attentn.”</p><p class="paywall">The novelist and edor Gordon Lish says, “Photographs don’t suggt any wise the enormo power he had person. No part of him was ever for a moment at rt.” He adds, “I adored him as a man. I mean, he was really a league wh Neal Cassady as a kd of prence.” But there was, he says, a fundamental difference between Broyard and Kerouac’s spiratn and me: “Unlike Cassady, who was out of ntrol, Anatole was <em>exorbantly</em> ntrol. He was fastid about managg thgs.”</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-2 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">Except, perhaps, the sorts of thgs you’re supposed to manage. His bookstore provid him wh entrée to Village tellectuals—and them wh entrée to Anatole—yet was not n as a bs, exactly. Its offergs were few but choice: Céle, Kafka, other hard-to-fd translatns. The cric Richard Gilman, who was one of s patrons, rells that Broyard had a hard time partg wh the ventory: “He had the books on the shelf, and someone would want to buy one, and he would snatch back.”</p><p class="paywall">Around 1948, Broyard started to attract notice not merely for his charm, his looks, and his nversatn but for his published wrgs. The early piec, as often as not, were about a subject to which he had privileged accs: blacks and black culture. <em>Commentary</em>, his third appearance s pag, dubbed him an “anatomist of the Negro personaly a whe world.” But was he merely an anthropologist or was he a native rmant? It wasn’t an ambiguy that he was any hurry to rolve. Still, if all cricism is a form of tobgraphy (as Osr Wil would have ), one might look to the piec for clu to his preoccupatns at the time. In a 1950 <em>Commentary</em> article entled “Portra of the Inthentic Negro,” he wrote that the Negro’s embarrassment over blackns should be banished by the realizatn that “thoands of Negro wh ‘typil’ featur are accepted as wh merely bee of light plexn.” He ntued:</p><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>The thentic Negro is not only tranged om wh—he is also tranged om his own group and om himself. Sce his panns are a mirror which he se himself as ugly, he mt reject them; and sce his own self is maly a tensn between an accatn and a nial, he n hardly fd , much ls live . . . . He is adrift whout a role a world predited on rol.</p></div></blockquote></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><asi class="PersistentAsiWrapper-VGrR daRVRt persistent-asi" style="posn:absolute;top:to;height:to" data-ttid="PersistentAsiWrapper"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--rail"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--rail" data-no-id="6fkvc"></div></div><div class="ConsumerMarketgUnThemedWrapper-iUTMTf jssHut nsumer-marketg-un nsumer-marketg-un--display-rail" role="prentatn" aria-hidn="te"><div class="nsumer-marketg-un__slot nsumer-marketg-un__slot--display-rail"></div><div class="journey-un"></div></div></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></asi></div></div><div data-ttid="RowWrapper" class="RowWrapper-UmqTg HEhan full-bleed-ad row-mid-ntent-ad"><div class="StickyMidContentAdWrapper-fSBzwl drzyIa ad-stickymidntent"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--mid-ntent should-hold-space"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--mid-ntent" data-no-id="9hn7m"></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><p class="paywall">A year later, “Keep Cool, Man: The Negro Rejectn of Jazz,” he wrote, jt as spairgly, that the Negro’s</p><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>ntact wh whe society has opened new vistas, new ials his imagatn, and the he fends by reprsn, eezg up agast the sire to be whe, to have normal social terurse wh wh, to behave like them. . . . But olns he evas the issue . . . he be a pacifist the stggle between social groups—not a nscient objector, but a draft-dodger.</p></div></blockquote><p class="paywall">The are words that uld be read as self-dictment, if anybody chose to do so. Certaly they reveal a ticklish sense of the perplexi he found himself , and a gree of self-terrogatn (as opposed to self-examatn) he seldom displayed aga.</p><p class="paywall">In 1950, a bar near Sheridan Square, Broyard met Anne Bernays, a Barnard junr and the dghter of Edward L. Bernays, who is nsired the father of public relatns. “There was this guy who was the handsomt man I have ever seen my life, and I fell madly love wh him,” Bernays, who is bt known for such novels as “Growg Up Rich” and “Profsor Romeo,” rells. “He was physilly irristible, and he had this domatg personaly, and I gus I need to be domated. His hair was so short that you uldn’t tell whether was curly or straight. He had high cheekbon and very smooth sk.” She knew that he was black, through a mutual iend, the poet and Blake scholar Milton Klonsky. (Years later, a sort of epiphany, she regnized Anatole’s lopg walk as an Ain-Amerin cultural style: “It was almost as if this were si him dyg to get out and exprs self, but he felt he uldn’t do .”)</p><p class="paywall">After graduatn, she got a job as an edor at the lerary semiannual <em>Disvery</em>. She persuad Broyard to subm his work, and 1954 the magaze ran a short story entled “What the Cystospe Said”—an extraordary acunt of his father’s termal illns:</p><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>I didn’t regnize him at first, he was so bad. His mouth was open and his breathg was hungry. They had removed his false teeth, and his cheeks were so th that his mouth looked like a keyhole. I leaned over his bed and brought my face before his ey. “Hello darl’,” he whispered, and he sed. His voice, fat as was, was full of love, and bristled the hairs on the nape of my neck and raised goose flh on my forearms. I uldn’t speak, so I kissed him. His cheek smelled like wax.</p></div></blockquote><p class="paywall">Overnight, Broyard’s renown was raised to a higher level. “Broyard knocked people flat wh ‘What the Cystospe Said,’ ” Lish rells. One of those people was Burt Brton, a bookseller who later ‑found Books & Co. In the fifti, he says, he read the works of young Amerin wrers religly: “Now, if wrg were a horse race, which God knows ’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 appeared. Ined, Bernays rells, on the basis of that story the Atlantic Monthly Prs offered Broyard a twenty-thoand-dollar advance—then a staggergly large sum for a lerary work by an unknown—for a novel of which “Cystospe” would be a chapter. “The whole lerary world was wag wh bated breath for this great novelist who was about to arrive,” Michael Vcent Miller, a iend of Broyard’s sce the late fifti, rells. “Some feelgs of expectatn lasted for years.”</p><p class="paywall">Rumor surround Broyard like a gentle murmur, and sometim beme a d. Beg an orphan of the avant-gar was hard work. Among the black lerati, certaly, his anctry was a topic of speculatn, and when a picture of Broyard acpanied a 1958 <em>Time</em> review of a Beat anthology was closely sctized. Arna Bontemps wrote to Langston Hugh, “His picture . . . mak him look Negroid. If so he is the only spa among the Beat Generatn.” Charlie Parker spied Broyard Washgton Square Park one day and told a pann, “He’s one of , but he don’t want to adm he’s one of .” Richard Gilman rells an awkwardns that ensued when he stumbled across Anatole wh his dark-skned wife and child: “I jt happened to e upon them a rtrant that was not near our ual stompg grounds. He troduced me, and was fe, but my sense was that he would rather not have had anyone he knew meet them.” He adds, “I remember thkg at the time that he had the look of an octoroon or a quadroon, one of those—which he strenuoly nied. He got to very great disput wh people.”</p></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></div></div><div data-ttid="RowWrapper" class="RowWrapper-UmqTg HEhan full-bleed-ad row-mid-ntent-ad"><div class="StickyMidContentAdWrapper-fSBzwl drzyIa ad-stickymidntent"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--mid-ntent should-hold-space"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--mid-ntent" data-no-id="omy0k"></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><p class="paywall">One of those disput was wh Chandler Brossard, who had been a close iend: Broyard was the bt man at Brossard’s weddg. There was a fallg out, and Brossard produced an unflatterg portra of Broyard as the htler and opportunist Henry Porter his 1952 novel, “Who Walk Darkns.” Brossard knew jt where Broyard was most vulnerable, and he phed hard. His novel origally began, “People said Henry Porter was a Negro,” and the versn published France still do. Apparently fearg legal actn, however, Brossard’s Amerin publisher, New Directns, sent to Broyard galley form before was published.</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-3 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">Anne Bernays was wh Broyard when the galleys arrived. Broyard explaed to her, “They asked me to read bee they are aaid I am gog to sue.” But why would he sue, she wanted to know. “Bee says I’m a Negro,” he replied grimly. “Then,” Bernays rells, “I said, ‘What are you gog to do?’ He said, ‘I am gog to make them change .’ And he did.”</p><p class="paywall">The novel went on to be celebrated as a groundbreakg chronicle of Village hipsters; also—as a rult of the legal redactns—reads rather oddly plac. Henry Porter, the Broyard character, is mored to be not a Negro but merely “an illegimate”:</p><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>I spect [the mor] was supposed to expla the difference between the way he behaved and the way the rt of behaved. Porter did not show that he knew people were talkg about him this way. I mt give him cred for matag a ont of difference that was really remarkable.</p><p>Someone both Porter and I knew que well once told me the next time he saw Porter he was gog to ask him if he was or was not an illegimate. He said was the only way to clear the air. Maybe so. But I said I would not thk of dog . . . . I felt that if Porter ever wanted the stori about himself cleared up, publicly, he would one day do so. I was willg to wa.</p></div></blockquote><p class="paywall">And that, after all, is the nature of such secrets: they are not what nnot be known but what nnot be acknowledged.</p><p class="paywall">Another trip wire seems to have land Broyard one of the masterpiec of twentieth-century Amerin fictn, William Gaddis’s “The Regnns.” Livelli explas, “Now, around 1947 or ’48, William Gaddis and Anatole were love wh the same gal, Sheri Martelli. They were rivals, almost at each other’s throats. And Willie was such a sweetheart that he had a d approach to everythg, and Anatole was sort of a stabber: he jected words like poison to nversatns.” When “The Regnns” me out, 1955, “Anatole ught on to right away, and he was kd of angry over .” 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,” seemgly “a parody on the moment, as his cloth ritured a past at eastern lleg where he had never been.” Worse is his “unnscnable se,” which timat “that the wearer knew all of the dismal secrets of some evil jungle whence he had jt e.”</p><p class="paywall">Broyard’s own acunt of the years—published 1993 as “Kafka Was the Rage”—is fuelled by the tertwed them of wrg and women. Gaddis says, “His ey were the great pools—soft, gentle pools. It was girls, girls, girls: a kd of toxitn of s own. I always thought, ankly, that that’s where his reer went, his creative energi.”</p><p class="paywall">Anne Bernays matas, “If you leave the sex part out, you’re only tellg half the story. Wh women, he was jt like an alholic wh booze.” She stopped seeg him 1952, at her therapist’s urgg. “It was like gog ld turkey off a dg,” she says, rememberg how cshg the experience was, and she adds, “I thk most women have an Anatole their liv.”</p><p class="paywall">Ined, not a few of them had Anatole. “He was a psy gangster, really,” Lus, a former profsor of parative lerature, says wh Bed-Stuy bluntns. Gilman rells beg Bergdorf Goodman and g across Broyard puttg the mov on a salgirl. “I hid behd a pillar—otherwise he’d know that I’d seen him—and watched him go through every stage of sctn: ‘What do you thk? Can I put this agast you? Oh, looks great agast your sk. You have the most wonrful sk.’ And then he quoted Blaire.”</p><p class="paywall">Quotg Blaire turns out to be key. Broyard’s great iend Ernt van n Haag rells trollg the Village wh Broyard those days: “We obvly que often pared our mod operandi, and what I observed about Anatole is that when he liked a girl he uld speak to her brilliantly about all kds of thgs which the girl didn’t the least unrstand, bee Anatole was really vastly ede. The girl had no ia what he was talkg about, but she loved , bee she was unr the imprsn, rightly so, that she was listeng to somethg very tertg and important. His was a solipsistic disurse, some ways.” Ined, the narrator of “What the Cystospe Said” tells of scg his ailg father’s young and genuo nurse a siar manner:</p></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--rail"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--rail" data-no-id="i3zaw"></div></div><div class="ConsumerMarketgUnThemedWrapper-iUTMTf jssHut nsumer-marketg-un nsumer-marketg-un--display-rail" role="prentatn" aria-hidn="te"><div class="nsumer-marketg-un__slot nsumer-marketg-un__slot--display-rail"></div><div class="journey-un"></div></div></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></div></div><div data-ttid="RowWrapper" class="RowWrapper-UmqTg HEhan full-bleed-ad row-mid-ntent-ad"><div class="StickyMidContentAdWrapper-fSBzwl drzyIa ad-stickymidntent"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--mid-ntent should-hold-space"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--mid-ntent" data-no-id="tgm21"></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>“Listen,” I said, borrowg a tone of urgency om another source, “I want to give you a book. A book that was wrten for you, a book that belongs to you as much as your diary, that’s dited to you like your nurse’s certifite.” . . . My apartment was four blocks away, so I bridged the distance wh talk, ravg about <em>Journey to the End of the Night</em>, the book she need like she need a hole her head.</p></div></blockquote><p class="paywall">Broyard regnized that sctn was a matter not only of talkg but of listeng, too, and he knew how to pay attentn wh an engulfg level of ncentratn. The wrer Ellen Schwamm, who met Broyard the late fifti, says, “You show me a man who talks, and I’ll show you a thoand women who hurl themselv at his feet. I don’t mean jt talk, I mean <em>dialogu</em>. He listened, and he was willg to speak of thgs that most men are not terted : lerature and s effect on life.” But she also saw another si to Broyard’s relentls need to sce. She vok a formulatn ma by her hband, the late Harold Brodkey: “Harold ed to say that a lot of men steal om women. They steal bs of their souls, bs of their personali, to nstct an emotnal life, which many men don’t have. And I thk that Anatole need somethg of that sort.”</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-4 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">It’s an image of self-assemblage which is very much keepg wh Broyard’s own acunts of himself. Startg 1946, and ntug at tervals for the rt of his life, he unrwent analysis. Yet the word “analysis” is misleadg: what he wanted was to be refashned—or, as he told his first analyst, to be <em>transfigured</em>. “When I me out wh the word, I was like someone who sneez to a handkerchief and fds full of blood,” he wrote the 1993 memoir. “I wanted to discs my life wh him not as a patient talkg to an analyst but as if we were two lerary crics discsg a novel. . . . I had a lerature rather than a personaly, a set of fictns about myself.” He lived a lie bee he didn’t want to live a larger lie: and Anatole Broyard, Negro wrer, was that larger lie.</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">Alexandra Nelson, known as Sandy, met Broyard January of 1961. Broyard was forty, teachg the odd urse at the New School and supportg himself by eelancg: promotnal py for publishers, ler not for Columbia jazz rerds, blurbs for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Sandy was twenty-three and a dancer, and Broyard had always loved dancers. Of Norwegian scent, she was strikgly betiful, and strikgly telligent. Michael Miller rells, “She reprented a certa kd of blon, a certa kd of sophistited rnage and a way of movg through the world wh a sense of the good thgs. They both had marvello taste.”</p><p class="paywall">It was as if a sorcerer had ma a list of everythg Broyard loved and had given life. At long last, the nqueror was nquered: ls than a year, Broyard and Sandy were married. Sandy remembers his ra those days: “Anatole was very hip. It wasn’t a pose— was his sew, his bon. And, when he was talkg to you, you jt felt that you were receivg all this radiance om him.” (Van n Haag says, “I do thk ’s not whout signifince that Anatole married a blon, and about as whe as you n get. He may have feared a ltle b that the children might turn out black. He mt have been pleased that they didn’t.”)</p><p class="paywall">While they were still datg, two of Broyard’s iends told Sandy that he was black, what seemed to be a clumsy attempt to sre her off. “I thk they really weren’t happy to lose him, to see him get to a ser relatnship,” she says. “They were losg a playmate, a way.” Whatever the cultural sanctns, she was unfazed. But she says that when she asked Broyard about he proved evasive: “He claimed that he wasn’t black, but he talked about ‘island fluenc,’ or said that he had a grandmother who ed to live a tree on some island the Caribbean. Anatole was like that—he was very slippery.” Sandy didn’t force the issue, and the succeedg years only fortified his sense of rerve. “Anatole was very strong,” she says. “And he said about certa thgs, ‘Jt keep out. This is the al if you get mixed up wh me.’ ” The life that Broyard chose to live meant that the children did not meet their Aunt Shirley until after his ath—nor, except for a uple of brief viss the sixti, was there any ntact even wh Broyard’s light-skned mother and olr sister. It was a matter of rpectg the ground l. “I would try to poke those areas, but the msage was very direct and strong,” Sandy explas. “Oh, when I got angry at him, you know, one always ph the tenr pots. But over time you grow up about the thgs and realize you do what you n do and there are certa thgs you n’t.”</p><p class="paywall">In 1963, jt before their first child, Todd, was born, Anatole shocked his iends by another big move—to Connecticut. Not only was he movg to Connecticut but he was gog to be mutg to work: for the first time his life, he would be a pany man. “I thk one of his claims to fame was that he hadn’t had an office job—somehow, he’d ped that,” Sandy says. “There had been no real need for him to grow up.” But after Todd was born—a dghter, Bliss, followed 1966—Anatole spent seven years workg full-time as a pywrer at the Manhattan advertisg agency Wunrman Ritta & Kle.</p><p class="paywall">Over the next quarter century, the fay lived a seri of eighteenth-century ho, sometim bought on impulse, plac like Fairfield, Reddg, Greens Farms, and Southport. Here, a land of leaf-blowers and lawnmowers, Bed-Stuy mt have seemed almost illy remote. Many of Broyard’s timat om the late forti knew about his fay; the timat he acquired the sixti did not, or else had heard only mors. Each year, the number of people who knew Buddy om Bed-Stuy dwdled; each year, the mors grew more nebulo; each year, he left his past further behd. Miller says, “Anatole was a master at what Ervg Goffman lls ‘imprsn management.’ ” The wrer Evelyn Toynton says, “I remember once gog to a party wh Sandy and him Connecticut. There were the rather dull people there, stockbrokers and the ual sorts of people, and Anatole jt knocked himself out to charm every sgle person the room. I said to him, ‘Anatole, n’t you ever <em>not</em> be charmg?’ ” Miller observ, “He was a wonrful host. He uld take people om different walks of life—the print of Stanley Tools or a vice-print of Merrill Lynch, say, and some bohemian type om the Village—and keep the whole scene flowg betifully. He had perfect pch for the social enunter, like Jay Gatsby.”</p></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></div></div><div data-ttid="RowWrapper" class="RowWrapper-UmqTg HEhan full-bleed-ad row-mid-ntent-ad"><div class="StickyMidContentAdWrapper-fSBzwl drzyIa ad-stickymidntent"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--mid-ntent should-hold-space"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--mid-ntent" data-no-id="wtrqvl"></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><p class="paywall">It was as if, wedd to an ial of Amerin self-fashng, he sought to put himself to the ultimate tt. It was one thg to be accepted the Village, amid the Beats and hipsters and émigrés, but to ga acceptance Cheever terrory was an achievement of a higher orr. “Anatole, when he left the Village and went to Connecticut, was able not only to pass but even to be a kd of fluential prence that world of rich whe Wasps,” Miller says. “Maybe that was a shallower part of the passg—to be accepted by Connecticut gentry.”</p><p class="paywall">Broyard’s feat raised eyebrows among some of his lerary admirers: somethg borrowed, somethg new. Daphne Merk, another longtime iend, tected “a ‘untry-squire’ tenncy—a plited tenncy to want to tablish a sort of safety through bourgeoisns. It was like a Galsworthy qualy.”</p><p class="paywall">Even Ardia, however, there uld be no relaxatn of vigilance: his most timate relatnships, there were guardrails. Broyard once wrote that Michael Miller was one of the people he liked bt the world, and Miller is ndid about Broyard’s profound fluence on him. Today, Miller is a psychotherapist, based Cambridge, and the thor, most recently, of “Intimate Terrorism.” From the time they met until his ath, Broyard read to him the first draft of almost every piece he wrote. Yet a thirty-year iendship of unual timacy was circumscribed by a subject that they never discsed. “First of all, I didn’t <em>know</em>,” Miller says. “I jt had tuns and had heard timatns. It was some years before I’d even put together some tun and ltle mblgs—nothg ever emerged clearly. There was a certa tac unrstandg between to accept certa pathways as our bt selv, and not challenge that too much.” It was perhaps, he says a ltle sadly, a limatn on the relatnship.</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">In the late sixti, Broyard wrote several ont-page reviews for the <em>Tim Book Review</em>. “They were brilliant, absolutely sensatnal,” the novelist Charl Simmons, who was then an assistant edor there, says. In 1971, the <em>Tim</em> was stg about for a new daily reviewer, and Simmons was among those who suggted Anatole Broyard. It wasn’t a tough sell. Arthur Gelb, at the time the paper’s cultural edor, rells, “Anatole was among the first crics I brought to the paper. He was very funny, and he also had that special knack for peratg hypocrisy. I don’t thk he was pable of utterg a borg sentence.”</p><p class="paywall">You uld say that his arrival was a sign of the tim. Image: Anatole Broyard, downtown flanr and apostle of sex and high mornism, ensnced what was, lerarily speakg, the ultimate tablishment perch. “There had been an awful lot of very tame, very nventnal people at the <em>Tim</em>, and Broyard me as a sort of ambassador om the Village and Village sophistitn,” Aled Kaz rells. Broyard had a highly veloped appreciatn of the paper’s stutnal power, and he even managed to e to avenge wrongs done him his Village days. Jt before he started his job at the daily, he published a review the <em>Tim Book Review</em> of a new novel by one Chandler Brossard. The review began, “Here’s a book so transcenntly bad mak fear not only for the ndn of the novel this untry, but for the untry self.”</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-5 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">Broyard’s reviews were published alternatn wh those of Christopher Lehmann-Hpt, who has now been a daily reviewer at the <em>Tim</em> for more than a quarter century, and who readily adms that Broyard’s appotment did not gladn his heart. They hadn’t got along particularly well when Lehmann-Hpt was an edor at the <em>Tim Book Review</em>, nor did Lehmann-Hpt entirely approve of Broyard’s stat as a fabled liberte. So when A. M. Rosenthal, the paper’s managg edor, was nsirg hirg him, Lehmann-Hpt exprsed rervatns. He rells, “Rosenthal was sayg, ‘Give me five reasons why not.’ And I thoughtlsly blurted out, ‘Well, first of all, he is the biggt ass man town.’ And Rosenthal rose up om his sk and said, ‘If that were a disqualifitn for workg for the New York <em>Tim’</em>—and he waved—‘this place would be empty!’ ”</p><p class="paywall">Broyard got off to an imprsive start. Lehmann-Hpt says, “He had a wonrful way of settg a tone, and a wonrful way of talkg himself through a review. He had good, tough stcts when me to fictn. He had taste.” And the jovial Herbert Mgang, who served a stt as a daily reviewer himself, says, “I always thought he was the most lerary of the reviewers. There would be somethg like a ltle say his daily reviews.”</p><p class="paywall">Ocsnally, his acerbic opns got him trouble. There was, for example, the storm that attend an uncharable review of a novel by Christy Brown, an Irish wrer who was born wh severe cerebral palsy. The review nclud:</p><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>It is unfortunate that the thor of “A Shadow on Summer” is an almost total spastic—he is said to have typed his highly regard first novel, “Down All the Days,” wh his left foot—but I don’t see how the badns of his send novel n be blamed on that. Any man who n learn to type wh his left foot n learn to wre better than he has here.</p></div></blockquote><p class="paywall">Then, there was the ntroversial review of Jam Baldw’s ply sentimental novel of black sufferg, “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Broyard wrote:</p><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>If I have to read one more scriptn of the garbage piled up the streets of Harlem, I may jt throw protol to the wds and ask whose garbage is ? I would like to remd Mr. Baldw that the Cy Health Co stipulat that garbage mt be put out proper ntaers, not discrimately “piled.”</p></div></blockquote><p class="paywall">No one uld acce Broyard of proselytizg for progrsive . Jason Epste, for one, was quick to tect a neonservative air his reviews, and Broyard’s old iend Ernt van n Haag, a longtime ntributg edor at <em>Natnal Review</em>, volunteers that he was available to set Broyard straight on the issu when the need arose. Broyard uld be mischievo, and he uld be tennt. It did not pe notice that he was nsistently hostile to femist wrers. “Perhaps ’s naïve of me to expect people to wre reasonable books about emotnally charged subjects,” one such review began, irrably. “But when you have to read and review two or three books each week, you do get tired of ‘unrstandg’ so much personal bias. You reach a pot where no longer matters that the thor’s mistak are well meant. You don’t re that he or she is on the si of the angels: you jt want them to tell the tth.”</p></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--rail"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--rail" data-no-id="7komw8"></div></div><div class="ConsumerMarketgUnThemedWrapper-iUTMTf jssHut nsumer-marketg-un nsumer-marketg-un--display-rail" role="prentatn" aria-hidn="te"><div class="nsumer-marketg-un__slot nsumer-marketg-un__slot--display-rail"></div><div class="journey-un"></div></div></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></div></div><div data-ttid="RowWrapper" class="RowWrapper-UmqTg HEhan full-bleed-ad row-mid-ntent-ad"><div class="StickyMidContentAdWrapper-fSBzwl drzyIa ad-stickymidntent"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--mid-ntent should-hold-space"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--mid-ntent" data-no-id="50xbm"></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><p class="paywall">Nor did relatns between the two daily reviewers ever bee altogether rdial. Lehmann-Hpt tells of a time 1974 when Broyard said that he was sick and uldn’t liver a review. Lehmann-Hpt had to wre an extra review ls than a day, so that he uld get to the Ali-Frazier fight the next night, where he had rgsi seats. Later, when they discsed the match, Broyard seemed spicly knowledgeable about s particulars; he claimed that a iend of his had been ved by a televisn executive to watch on closed-circu TV. “I waed about six months, bee one of the charmg thgs about Anatole was that he never remembered his li,” Lehmann-Hpt says, lghg. “And I said, ‘Did you see that fight?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah—I was there as a gut of this televisn executive.’ <em>That’s</em> why he uldn’t wre the review!”</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">Broyard had been teachg off and on at the New School sce the late fifti, and now his reputatn as a wrg teacher began to soar. Certaly his fluent prose style, wh s batn of grace and clary, was a nsirable remendatn. He was charismatic and magisterial, and, bee he was sometim btal about stunts’ work, they found all the more gratifyg when he was plimentary. Among his stunts were Pl Brlow, Robert Olen Butler, Daphne Merk, and Hilma Wolzer. Ellen Schwamm, who took a workshop wh him the early seventi, says, “He had a gourmet’s taste for lerature and for language, and he was really able to nvey that: was a very sensual experience.”</p><p class="paywall">The were years of heady succs and, at the same time, of a risg sense of failure. An arber of Amerin wrg, Broyard was racked by his abily to wre his own magnum op. In the fifti, the Atlantic Monthly Prs had ntracted for an tobgraphil novel—the novel that was supposed to secure Broyard’s fame, his place ntemporary lerature—but, all the years later, he had ma no progrs. It wasn’t for lack of tryg. Lehmann-Hpt rells his takg a lengthy vatn orr to get the book wrten. “I remember talkg to him—he was up Vermont, where somebody had lent him a hoe—and he was agony. He banished himself om the Veyard, was clearly sufferg, and he jt uldn’t do .” John Updike, who knew Broyard slightly om the Veyard, was remd of the anticipatn surroundg Ellison’s send novel: “The most famo non-book around was the one that Broyard was not wrg.” (The two non-book wrers were fact que iendly: Broyard admired Ellison not only as a wrer but as a dancer—a high tribute om such an apt as Broyard.)</p><p class="paywall">Surround by analysts and psychotherapists—Sandy Broyard had bee a therapist herself by this time—Broyard had no shortage of explanatns for his abily to wre his book. “He did have a total wrer’s block,” van n Haag says, “and he was analyzed by var persons, but didn’t fully overe the wrer’s block. I uldn’t prevent him om gog back to ‘The Cystospe’ and tryg to improve . He ma , of urse, not better but worse.” Broyard’s fluency as an sayist and a reviewer wasn’t que pensatn. Charl Simmons says, “He had produced all this charmg cricism, but the one thg that mattered to him was the one thg he hadn’t managed to do.”</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-6 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">As the seventi wore on, Miller discsed the matter of blockage wh his bt iend relatively abstract terms: he suggted that there might be somethg Broyard’s relatnship to his fay background that was holdg him back. In the eighti, he referred Broyard to his own chief mentor gtalt therapy, Isador From, and From beme perhaps Broyard’s most important therapist his later years. “In gtalt therapy, we talk a lot about ‘unfished bs’: anythg that’s plete, unfished, hnts the whole personaly and tends, at some level, to create hibn or blockage,” Miller says. “You’re stuck there at a certa pot. It’s like livg wh a partly full bladr all your life.”</p><p class="paywall">Some people speculated that the reason Broyard uldn’t wre his novel was that he was livg —that race loomed larger his life bee was unacknowledged, that he uldn’t put behd him bee he had put beneath him. If he had been a different sort of wrer, might not have mattered so much. But Merk pots out, “Anatole’s subject, even fictn, was sentially himself. I thk that ultimately he would have had to al wh more than he wanted to al wh.”</p><p class="paywall">Broyard may have been the picture of serene self-mastery, but there was one subject that uld reliably flter him. Gordon Lish rells an ocsn the mid-seventi when Burt Brton (who was married to a black woman) allud to Anatole’s racial anctry. Lish says, “Anatole beme flamed, and he left the room. He snapped, like a dog snappg—he <em>barked</em> at Brton. It was an ugly moment.” To people who knew nothg about the matter, Broyard’s sensivi were at tim simply perplexg. The cric Judh Dunford ed to go to lunch wh Broyard the eighti. One day, Broyard mentned his sister Shirley, and Dunford, idly makg nversatn, asked him what she looked like. Sudnly, she saw an extremely worried exprsn on his face. Very refully, he replied, “Darker than me.”</p><p class="paywall">There was, fally, no sanctuary. “When the children were olr, I began, every eighteen months or so, to brg up the issue of how they need to know at some pot,” Sandy Broyard says. “And then he would totally shut down and go to a rage. He’d say that at some pot he would tell them, but he would not tell them now.” He was the Scheheraza of racial imposture, seekg and securg one ferral after another. It mt have ma thgs not easier but harr. In the morn era, children are supposed to e out to their parents: works better that way around. For children, we know, n judge their parents harshly—above all, for what they unrstand as failur of ndor. His children would see the world terms of thenticy; he saw the world terms of self-creatn. Would they thk that he had ma a Fstian barga? Would they speculate about what else he had not told them—about the lims of self-ventn? Broyard’s ristance is not hard to fathom. He mt have wonred when the past would learn s place, and stay past.</p><p class="paywall">Anatole Broyard had nfsed enough his time to know that nfsn did nothg for the soul. He preferred to munite his tths on higher equenci. As if exorcism, Broyard’s personal says al regularly wh the necsary, guilt-ridn enavor of pg fay history: and yet the feelgs volved are well-nigh universal. The thematic elements of passg—agmentatn, alienatn, limaly, self-fashng—echo the great them of mornism. As a rult, he uld prepare the way for exposure whout ever riskg . Miller observ, “If you look at the wrg closely enough, and listen to the tonatns, there’s somethg there that is like no wrer om the pletely whe world. Frd talked about the repetn pulsn. Wh Anatole, ’s tertg that he was nstantly hidg and some ways nstantly revealg .”</p><p class="paywall">Sandy speaks of the matters lmly analytic ton; perhaps bee she is a therapist, her love is tempered by an almost profsnal dispassn. She says, “I thk his own personal history ntued to be paful to him,” and she adds, “In passg, you e your fay great anguish, but I also thk, nversely, do we look at the anguish the person who is passg? Or the anguish that was born out of?”</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">It may be temptg to scribe Broyard’s self-posng as arisg om a tortured allegiance to some liberal-humanist creed. In fact, the liberal pieti of the day were not much to his taste. “It wasn’t about an ial of racelsns but somethg much more plex and tertg,” Miller says. “He was actually que anti-black,” Evelyn Toynton says. She tells of a time when she was walkg wh him on a street New York and a dnken black man me up to him and asked for a dollar. Broyard seethed. Afterward, he remarked to her, “I look around New York, and I thk to myself, If there were no blacks New York, would really be any loss?”</p><p class="paywall">No doubt this is a lculatn that wh, even whe liberals, sometim fd themselv idly workg out: How many black muggers is one Thelon Monk worth? How many Willie Hortons do Gwendolyn Brooks reem? In 1970, Ellison published his classic say “What Ameri Would Be Like Whout Blacks,” <em>Time</em>; and one reason is a classic say is that addrs a qutn that lgers the Amerin polil unnsc. Commandg as Ellison’s arguments are, there remas a wh of fensivens the very exercise. It’s a burnsome thg to refute a fantasy.</p><p class="paywall">And a burnsome thg to be privy to . Ellen Schwamm rells that one of the ho Broyard had Connecticut had a black jockey on the lawn, and that “he ed to tell me that Jimmy Baldw had said to him, ‘I n’t e and see you wh this crap on your lawn.’ ” (Sandy remembers the lawn jockey—an antique—as havg e wh the hoe; she also rells that was stolen one day.) Charl Simmons says that the wrer Herbert Gold, before troducg him to Broyard, warned him that Broyard was prone to make ments about “spas,” and Broyard did make a few such ments. “He personally, on a eper level, was not enamored of blacks,” van n Haag says. “He avoid blacks. There is no qutn he did.” Sandy is ggerly alludg to this subject. “He was very short-tempered wh the behavr of black people, the sort of behavr that was shown the news. He had paid the price to be at liberty to say thgs that, if you didn’t know he was black, you would misunrstand. I thk ma him ironil.”</p></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></div></div><div data-ttid="RowWrapper" class="RowWrapper-UmqTg HEhan full-bleed-ad row-mid-ntent-ad"><div class="StickyMidContentAdWrapper-fSBzwl drzyIa ad-stickymidntent"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--mid-ntent should-hold-space"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--mid-ntent" data-no-id="g77g4c"></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><p class="paywall">Every once a while, however, Broyard’s irony would slacken, and he would speak of the thg wh an unacctomed and haltg forthrightns. Toynton says that after they’d known each other for several years he told her there was a “C” (actually, “l,” for “lored”) on his birth certifite. “And then another time he told me that his sister was black and that she was married to a black man.” The circumlocutns are strikg: not that <em>he</em> was black but that his birth certifite was; not that <em>he</em> was black but that his fay was. Perhaps this was a matter ls of evasivens than of precisn.</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-7 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">“Some shrk had said to him that the reason he didn’t like brown-haired women or dark women was that he was aaid of his own sh,” Toynton ntu. “And I said, ‘Anatole, ’s as pla as pla n be that has to do wh beg black.’ And he jt stopped and said, ‘You don’t know what was like. It was horrible.’ He told me once that he didn’t like to see his sisters, bee they remd him of his unhappy childhood.” (Shirley’s acunt suggts that this unhappy childhood may have had more to do wh the child than wh the hood.)</p><p class="paywall">Ellen Schwamm remembers one ocsn when Broyard vised her and Harold Brodkey at their apartment, and read them part of the memoir he was workg on. She says that the passag seemed stilted and distant, and that Brodkey said to him, “You’re not tellg the tth, and if you try to wre li or eva the tth this is what you get. What’s the real story?” She says, “Anatole took a ep breath and said, ‘The real story is that I’m not who I seem. I’m a black.’ I said, ‘Well, Anatole, ’s no great shock, bee this mor has been around for years and years and years, and everyone assum there’s a small percentage of you that’s black, if that’s what you’re tryg to say.’ And he said, ‘No, that’s not what I’m tryg to say. My father uld pass, but fact my mother’s black, too. We’re black as far back as I know.’ We never said a word of to anybody, bee he asked not to.”</p><p class="paywall">Schwamm also says that she begged him to wre about his history: seemed to her excellent material for a book. But he explaed that he didn’t want notoriety based on his race—on his revealg himself to be black—rather than on his talent. As Toynton puts , Broyard felt that he had to make a choice between beg an athete and beg a Negro. “He felt that once he said, ‘I’m a Negro wrer,’ he would have to wre about black issu, and Anatole was such an athete.”</p><p class="paywall">All the same, Schwamm was imprsed by a paradox: the man wanted to be appreciated not for beg black but for beg a wrer, even though his pretendg not to be black was stoppg him om wrg. It was one of the very few ironi that Broyard, the master ironist, was ill equipped to appreciate.</p><p class="paywall">Bis, there was always his day job to attend to. Broyard might suffer through a midnight of the soul Vermont; but he was also a workg journalist, and when me to filg his py he nearly always met his adl. In the late seventi, he also began publishg brief personal says the <em>Tim</em>. They are among the ft work he did—easeful, wty, perfectly poised between surface and pth. In them he perfected the feat of beg self-revelatory whout revealg anythg. He wrote about his current life, Connecticut: “People New York Cy have psychotherapists, and people the suburbs have handymen. While anxiety the cy is existential, the untry is stctural.” And he wrote about his earlier life, the cy: “There was a kd of jazz my father’s movements, a rhythm pound of enomy and flourish, functnal and rative. He had a blu song his blood, a wistful jnts he brought wh him om New Orleans.” (Wistful, and even worrisome: “I half-expected him to break to the Camel Walk, the Shimmy Shewobble, the Black Bottom or the Ms Around.”) In a 1979 say he wrote about how much he dread fay excursns:</p><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>To me, they were like a suici pact. Didn’t my parents know that the world was jt wag for a chance to e between ?</p></div></blockquote><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>Insi, we were a fay, but outsi we were immigrants, bizarre our differenc. I thought that people stared at , and my face grew hot. At any moment, I expected my father and mother to expose their tribal r, their eccentric anthropology, to the gape of strangers.</p></div></blockquote><blockquote class="BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-SdiGL jPeLne paywall blockquote-embed"><div class="BlockquoteEmbedContent-RbGs gmbtPx blockquote-embed__ntent"><p>Anyone who saw me wh my fay knew too much about me.</p></div></blockquote></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--rail"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--rail" data-no-id="vzd57p"></div></div><div class="ConsumerMarketgUnThemedWrapper-iUTMTf jssHut nsumer-marketg-un nsumer-marketg-un--display-rail" role="prentatn" aria-hidn="te"><div class="nsumer-marketg-un__slot nsumer-marketg-un__slot--display-rail"></div><div class="journey-un"></div></div></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></div></div><div data-ttid="RowWrapper" class="RowWrapper-UmqTg HEhan full-bleed-ad row-mid-ntent-ad"><div class="StickyMidContentAdWrapper-fSBzwl drzyIa ad-stickymidntent"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--mid-ntent should-hold-space"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--mid-ntent" data-no-id="76awrj"></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><p class="paywall">The were the them he returned to many of his personal says, seemgly markg out the thrhold he would not cross. And if some of his lleagu at the <em>Tim</em> knew too much about him, or had heard the mors, they wouldn’t have dreamed of sayg anythg. Abe Rosenthal (who did know about him) says that the subject never arose. “What was there to talk about? I didn’t really nsir my bs. I didn’t thk was proper or pole, nor did I want him to thk I was prejudiced, or anythg.”</p><p class="paywall">But most people knew nothg about . C. Gerald Fraser, a reporter and an edor at the <em>Tim</em> om 1967 until 1991, was iendly wh Broyard’s brother--law Ambassador Frankl Williams. Fraser, who is black, rells that one day Williams asked him how many black journalists there were at the <em>Tim</em>. “I listed them,” he says, “and he said, ‘You fot one.’ I went over the list aga, and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Shirley’s brother, Anatole Broyard.’ I was dumbstck, bee I’d never heard mentned at the <em>Tim</em> that he was black, or that the paper had a black cric.”</p><p class="paywall">In any event, Broyard’s lleagu did not have to know what he was to have rervatns about <em>who</em> he was. He cultivated his image as a trickster—someone who would bend the l, fse the system—and that image only tensified his tractors’ ire. “A good book review is an act of sctn, and when he did there was nobody better,” John Leonard says, but he feels that Broyard’s bt was not always offered. “I nsired him to be one of the lazit book reviewers to e down the pike.” Soon a nng joke was that Broyard would review only novels shorter than two hundred pag. In the troductn to “Aroed by Books,” a llectn of the reviews he published the early seventi, Broyard wrote that he tried to choose books for review that were “clost to [his] feelgs.” Lehmann-Hpt says dryly, “We began to spect that he often picked the books acrdg to the attractivens of the young female novelists who had wrten them.” Rosenthal had shamed him for voicg his disquiet about Broyard’s reputatn as a Don Juan, but before long Rosenthal himself changed his tune. “Maybe five or six years later,” Lehmann-Hpt rells, “Rosenthal up to me, jabbg me the cht wh a stiffened x fger and sayg, ‘The trouble wh Broyard is that he wr wh his ck!’ I b my tongue.”</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-8 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">Gradually, a measure of disntent wh Broyard’s reviews began to make self felt among the paper’s cultural missars. Harvey Shapiro, the edor of the <em>Book Review</em> om 1975 to 1983, rells nversatns wh Rosenthal which “he would tell me that all his iends hated Anatole’s says, and I would tell him that all my iends loved Anatole’s says, and that would be the end of the nversatn.” In 1984, Broyard was removed om the daily <em>Tim</em> and given a lumn the <em>Book Review</em>.</p><p class="paywall">Mchel Levas, the edor of the <em>Book Review</em> om 1983 to 1989, eded Broyard’s lumn himself. He says, “It was a tough time for him, you see, bee he had e off the daily book review, where he was out there the public eye twice a week. That was a major change his public role.” In addn to wrg his lumn, he was put to work as an edor at the <em>Book Review</em>. The office environment was perhaps not altogether ngenial to a man of his temperament. Kaz rells, “He plaed to me nstantly about beg on the <em>Book Review</em>, bee he had to check people’s quotatns and such. I thk he thought that he was superr to the job.”</p><p class="paywall">Then, too, was an era which the very notn of passg was begng to seem ls plangent than prepostero. Certaly Broyard’s sktishns around the subject wasn’t to everyone’s likg. Brent Stapl, who is black, was an edor at the <em>Book Review</em> at the time Broyard was there “Anatole had both ways,” Stapl says. “He would give you a kd of burlque wk that seemed to dite he was ready to accept the fact of your knowg that he was a black person. It was a real ambiguy, tac and sort of recsed. He jived around and played wh a lot, but never ma exprs the fact that he was black.” It was a game that tried Stapl’ patience. “When Anatole me anywhere near me, for example, his whole style, meanor, and tone would change,” he rells. “I took that as him nveyg to me, ‘Y, I am like you. But I’m relatg this to you on a kd of rende channel.’ Over all, ma me angry. Here was a guy who was, for a long perd of time, probably one of the two or three most important cril voic on lerature the Uned Stat. How uld you, actively or passively, have this fact hidn?”</p><p class="paywall">Stapl ps, then says, “You know, he turned to a joke. And when you change somethg basic about yourself to a joke, spreads, metastasiz, and so his whole prentatn of self beme pletely ironic. <em>Everythg</em> about him was ironic.”</p></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></div></div><div data-ttid="RowWrapper" class="RowWrapper-UmqTg HEhan full-bleed-ad row-mid-ntent-ad"><div class="StickyMidContentAdWrapper-fSBzwl drzyIa ad-stickymidntent"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--mid-ntent should-hold-space"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--mid-ntent" data-no-id="7gavg"></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-hfxa bjczjj grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="BodyWrapper-kufPGa bDyAMU body body__ntaer article__body" data-journey-hook="client-ntent" data-ttid="BodyWrapper"><div class="body__ner-ntaer"><p class="paywall">There were some people who me to have a profsnal tert achievg a measure of clary on the topic. Not long before Broyard retired om the <em>Tim</em>, 1989, Daphne Merk, as an edor at Harurt Brace Jovanovich, gave him an advance of a hundred thoand dollars for his memoirs. (The pleted portn was ultimately published, as “Kafka Was the Rage,” by Crown.) Merk learned that “he was, some ways, opaque to himself,” and her disquiet grew when the early chapters arrived. “I said, ‘Anatole, there’s somethg odd here. Wh the memoir, you have your fay movg to a black neighborhood Brooklyn. I fd that strange—unls they’re black.’ I said, ‘You n do many thgs if you’re wrg a memoir. But if you squelch stuff that seems to be ccial about you, and pretend don’t exist . . .’ ” She observ that he was much attached to aspects of his childhood, but “ a cloud way.”</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">When Broyard retired om the <em>Tim</em>, he was nearly sixty-ne. To Sandy, was a source of some anguish that their children still did not know the tth about him. Yet what was that tth? Broyard was a cric—a cric who specialized European and Amerin fictn. And what was race but a European and Amerin fictn? If he was passg for whe, perhaps he unrstood that the alternative was passg for black. “But if some people are light enough to live like whe, mother, why should there be such a fs?” a girl asks her mother “Near-Whe,” a 1931 story by the Harlem Renaissance thor Cl McKay. “Why should they live lored when they uld be happier livg whe?” Why, ed? One uld nce that the passg of Anatole Broyard volved dishonty; but is so very clear that the dishonty was mostly Broyard’s?</p><p class="paywall">To pass is to s agast thenticy, and “thenticy” is among the foundg li of the morn age. The philosopher Charl Taylor summariz s iology th: “There is a certa way of beg human that is <em>my</em> way. I am lled upon to live my life this way, and not imatn of anyone else’s life. But this notn giv a new importance to beg te to myself. If I am not, I miss the pot of my life; I miss what beg human is for <em>me</em>.” And the Romantic fallacy of thenticy is only pound when is llectivized: when the putative real me giv way to the real . You n say that Anatole Broyard was (by any juridil reckong) “really” a Negro, whout ncedg that a Negro is a thg you n really be. The vagari of racial inty were creased by what anthropologists ll the le of “hyposcent”—the one-drop le. When those of mixed anctry—and the majory of blacks are of mixed anctry—disappear to the whe majory, they are tradnally acced of nng om their “blackns.” Yet why isn’t the alternative a matter of nng om their “whens”? To emphasize the perversi, however, is a distractn om a larger perversy. You n’t get race “right” by refg the boundary ndns.</p><p class="paywall">The act of razorg out your ntributor’s note may be quixotic, but is not mad. The mistake is to assume that birth certifit and bgraphil sketch and all the other documents generated by the morn burecratic state reveal an anterr tth—that they are merely signs of an penntly existg inty. But fact they nstute . The social meang of race is tablished by the inty papers—by tracts and treatis and certifit and pamphlets and all the other verbal artifacts that proclaim race to be real and, by that proclamatn, make so.</p><p class="paywall">So here is a man who passed for whe bee he wanted to be a wrer, and he did not want to be a Negro wrer. It is a crass disjunctn, but is not his crassns or his disjunctn. His perceptn was perfectly rrect. He <em>would</em> have had to be a Negro wrer, which was somethg he did not want to be. In his terms, he did not want to wre about black love, black passn, black sufferg, black joy; he wanted to wre about love and passn and sufferg and joy. We give lip service to the ia of the wrer who happens to be black, but had anyone, the postwar era, ever seen such a thg?</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-9 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">Broyard’s iend Richard A. Shwer, an anthropologist and a theorist of culture, says, “I thk he believed that realy is nstuted by style,” and ascrib to Broyard a “eply romantic view of the timate nnectn between style and realy.” Broyard passed not bee he thought that race wasn’t important but bee he knew that was. The durable social facts of race were beyond reason, and, like Pl Broyard’s furnure, their strength me at the expense of style. Anatole Broyard lived a world where race had, ed, bee a trope for libily, for permanence. “All I <em>have</em> to do,” a black folk sayg has , “is stay black and die.”</p><p class="paywall">Broyard was a nnoissr of the limal—of crossg over and, the faiar phrase, gettg over. But the iologi of morny have a kicker, which is that they perm no ex. Racial recal is a forlorn hope. In a system where whens is the flt, racelsns is never a possibily. You nnot opt out; you n only opt . In a sthg review of a now fotten black thor, Broyard announced that was time to rensir the assumptn of many black wrers that “ ‘whey’ will never let you fet you’re black.” For his part, he wasn’t takg any chanc. At a certa pot, he seems to have cid that all he had to do was stay whe and die.</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">In 1989, Broyard rolved that he and his wife would change their life once more. Wh both their children grown, they uld do what they pleased. And what they pleased—what he pleased, anyway—was to move to Cambridge, Massachetts. They would be near Harvard, and so part of an tellectual muny. He had a visn of walkg through Harvard Square, bumpg to people like the soclogist Daniel Bell, and havg nversatns about ias the street. Bis, his close iend Michael Miller was livg the area. Anne Bernays, also a Cambridge rint, says, “I remember his llg several tim and askg me about neighborhoods. It was important for him to get that right. I thk he was a ltle disappoted when he moved that wasn’t to a fancy neighborhood like Brattle or Channg Street. He was on Wenll Street, where there’s a tennis urt across the street and an apartment buildg and the ho are fairly close together.” It wasn’t a matter of passg so much as of posng.</p><p class="paywall">Sandy says that they had another the-children-mt-be-told nversatn shortly before the move. “We were drivg to Michael’s fiftieth-birthday party—I ed to plan to brg up the subject a place where he uldn’t walk out. I brought up then bee at that pot our son was out of llege and our dghter had jt graduated, and my feelg was that they jt absolutely need to know, as adults.” She ps. “And we had words. He would jt brg down this gate.” Sandy surmis, aga, that he may have wanted to protect them om what he had experienced as a child. “Also,” she says, “I thk he need still to protect himself.” The day after they moved to their hoe on Wenll Street, Broyard learned that he had prostate ncer, and that was operable.</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">Broyard spent much of the time before his ath, fourteen months later, makg a study of the lerature of illns and ath, and publishg a number of says on the subject. Dpe the ocsn, they were imbued wh an almost dandyish, even jokey sense of ngy: “My urologist, who is que famo, wanted to cut off my tticl. . . . Speakg as a surgeon, he said that was the surt, quickt, neatt solutn. Too neat, I said, picturg myself wh no balls. I knew that such a solutn would prs me, and I was sure that prsn is bad medice.” He had attracted notice 1954 wh the acunt of his father’s ath om a siar ncer; now he recharged his wrg reer as a chronicler of his own progrs toward ath. He thought about llg his llectn of wrgs on the subject “Crilly Ill.” It was a pun he lighted .</p><p class="paywall">Soon after the diagnosis was ma, he was told that he might have “ the neighborhood of years.” Eight months later, beme clear that this prognosis was too optimistic. Richard Shwer, the anthropologist, talks about a trip to France that he and his wife ma wh Anatole and Sandy not long before Anatole’s ath. One day, the two men were left alone. Shwer says, “And what did he want to do? He wanted to throw a ball. The two of jt played tch, back and forth.” The moment, he believ, ptur Broyard’s athleticism, his love of physil grace.</p><p class="paywall">Broyard spent the last five weeks of his life at the Dana Farber Cancer Instute, Boston. In therapy ssns, the need to set thgs straight before the end had e up aga—the need to al wh unfished bs and, most of all, wh his secret. He appeared willg, if reluctant, to do so. But by now he was almost nstant pa, and the two children lived different plac, so the opportuni to have the discsn as a fay were limed. “Anatole was such physil pa that I don’t thk he had the wherewhal,” Sandy says. “So he missed the opportuny to tell the children himself.” She speaks of the expense of spir, of psychic energy, that would have been required. The challenge would have been to expla why had remaed a secret. And no doubt the old anxieti were not easily dispelled: would have been nmned as a Fstian barga or unrstood as a se of personaly overspillg, or rebellg agast, the reign of tegory?</p><p class="paywall">It pas Sandy even now that the children never had the chance to have an open discsn wh their father. In the event, she felt that they need to know before he died, and, for the first time, she took upon herself to clare what her hband uld not. It was an early afternoon, ten days before his ath, when she sat down wh her two children on a patch of grass across the street om the stute. “They knew there was a fay secret, and they wanted to know what their father had to tell them. And I told them.”</p><p class="paywall">The stillns of the afternoon was undisturbed. She says refully, “Their first reactn was relief that was only this, and not an event or circumstance of larger proportns. Only followg their father’s ath did they beg to feel the loss of not havg known. And of havg to reformulate who was that they unrstood their father—and themselv—to be.”</p><p class="paywall">At this stage of his illns, Anatole was movg and out of lucidy, but his room Sandy and the children talked wh humor and irony about secrets and about this particular secret. Even if Anatole uld not participate the nversatn, he uld at least listen to . “The nurs said that hearg was the last sense to go,” Sandy says.</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-10 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">It was not as she would have planned . She says, gently, “Anatole always found his own way through thgs.”</p><p class="paywall">The wrer Llie Garis, a iend of the Broyards’ om Connecticut, was Broyard’s room durg the last weekend of September, 1990, and rerd much of what he said on his last day of somethg like sentience. He weighed perhaps seventy pounds, she gused, and she scrib his jndice-cloud ey as havg the permanently startled look born of emaciatn. He was partly lucid, mostly not. There are glimps of his ual w, but a mo more aleatoric than logil. He spoke of Robert Grav, of Sheri Martelli, of John Hawk terpretg Mil Davis. He told Sandy that he need to fd a place to go where he uld “protect his irony.” As if, havg been protected by irony throughout his life, was now time to return the favor.</p><p class="paywall">“I thk iends are g, so I thk we ought to orr some food,” he announced hours before he lapsed to his fal a. “We’ll want chee and crackers, and Fst.”</p><p class="paywall">“Fst?” Sandy asked.</p><p class="paywall">Anatole explaed, “He’s the kd of guy who mak the Fstian barga, and who n be happy only when the thg is revealed.”</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">A memorial service, held at a Congregatnalist church Connecticut, featured gt figur om lerary New York, lleagu om the <em>Tim</em>, and neighbors and iends om the Village and the Veyard. Charl Simmons told me that he was surprised at how hard he took Broyard’s ath. “You felt that you were gog to have him forever, the way you feel about your own child,” he said. “There was somethg wrong about his dyg, and that was the reason.” Speakg of the memorial service, he says, marvellg, “You thk that you’re the close iend, you know? And then I realized that there were twenty people ahead of me. And that his geni was for close iends.”</p><p class="paywall">Ined, six years after Broyard’s ath many of his iends seem to be still mourng his loss. For them he was plaly a val prciple, a dancer and romancer, a scer of men and women. (He nsired sctn, he wrote, “the most heartfelt lerature of the self.”) Sandy tells me, simply, “You felt more alive his prence,” and I’ve heard almost precisely the same words om a great many others. They felt that he lived more tensely than other men. They loved him—perhaps his male iends pecially, or, anyway, more volubly—and they admired him. They speak of a limber bety, of agelsns, of a radiance. They also speak of his excs and his penchant for pos. Perhaps, as the bard has , Broyard was “much more the better for beg a ltle bad.”</p><p class="paywall">And if his prence Amerin fictn was pretty much limed to other people’s novels, that is no small tribute to his personal vibrancy. You fd him reflected and reacted the books of his peers, like Anne Bernays (she says there is a Broyard character every novel she’s wrten) and Brossard and Gaddis, of urse, but also those of his stunts. His own great gift was as a filletonist. The personal says llected “Men, Women and Other Anticlimax” n put you md of “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” by Oliver Wenll Holm, Sr. They are brief imprompt, tonally flawls. To read them is to feel that you are the pany of someone who is thkg thgs through. The says are often urbane and sophistited, but not unbearably so, and they n be unexpectedly movg. Lerary culture still fetishiz the novel, and there he was perhaps out of step wh his tim. Sandy says, “In the seventi and eighti, the trend, lerature and film, was to get sparer, and the flourish of Anatole’s voice was pennt on the luxuriance of his language.” Richard Shwer says, “It do seem that Anatole’s strength was the brief, wty remark. It was aphoristic. It was the cril review. He was brilliant a thoand or two thoand words.” Perhaps he wasn’t sted to be a novelist, but what of ? Broyard was a Negro who wanted to be somethg other than a Negro, a cric who wanted to be somethg other than a cric. Broyard, you might say, wanted to be somethg other than Broyard. He very nearly succeed.</p><p class="has-dropp has-dropp__lead-standard-headg paywall">Shirley Broyard Williams me to his memorial service, and many of his iends—cludg Aled Kaz, who livered one of the logi—remember beg puzzled and then astonished as they realized that Anatole Broyard was black. For Todd and Bliss, however, meetg Aunt Shirley was, at last, a flh-and-blood nfirmatn of what they had been told. Shirley is sorry that they didn’t meet sooner, and she remas baffled about her brother’s cisn. But she isn’t bter about ; her attu is that she has had a full and eventful life of her own—hband, kids, iends—and that if her brother wanted to keep himself aloof she rpected his cisn. She scrib the nversatns they had when they did speak: “They always had to be focsed on somethg, like a movie, bee you uldn’t afford to be very timate. There had to be somethg that would get the way of the timacy.” And when she phoned him durg his illns was the same way. “He never gave that up,” she says, soundg more wistful than reproachful. “He never learned how to be fortable wh me.” So has been a tryg set of circumstanc all around. “The hypocrisy that surrounds this issue is so thick you uld chew ,” Shirley says wearily.</p><p class="paywall">Shirley’s hband died several months before Anatole, and I thk she mt have found cheerg to be able to meet fay members who had been sequtered om 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 enuragg Bliss to e and talk, and we had lunch, and she lls me on the phone. She’s really rpond very well. Consirg that ’s sort of last-mute.”</p><div data-attr-viewport-monor="le-recirc" class="le-recirc-wrapper le-recirc-observer-target-11 viewport-monor-anchor"></div><p class="paywall">Years earlier, an say entled “Growg Up Irratnal,” Anatole Broyard wrote, “I <em>scend</em> om my mother and father. I was <em>extracted</em> om them.” His parents were “a nspiracy, a plot agast society,” as he saw , but also a source of profound embarrassment. “Like every great tradn, my fay had to die before I uld unrstand how much I missed them and what they meant to me. When they went to the flam at the crematorium, all my letters of troductn went wh them.” Now that he had a wife and fay of his own, he had started to worry about whether his children’s feelgs about him would reprise his feelgs about his parents: “Am I an embarrassment to them, or an accepted part of the human edy? Have they joed my nspiracy, or are they jt pretendg? Do they unrstand that, after all those years of nng away om home, I am still tryg to get back?” ♦</p></div></div></div><div class="GridItem-buujkM fVLMby grid--em grid-layout__asi"><div class="StickyBoxWrapper-jfYB jxBcTH sticky-box"><div class="StickyBoxPrimary-dzWDWL cdhYoN sticky-box__primary"><div class="AdWrapper-dQtivb fZrssQ ad ad--rail"><div class="ad__slot ad__slot--rail" data-no-id="3s8pbm"></div></div><div class="ConsumerMarketgUnThemedWrapper-iUTMTf jssHut nsumer-marketg-un nsumer-marketg-un--display-rail" role="prentatn" aria-hidn="te"><div class="nsumer-marketg-un__slot nsumer-marketg-un__slot--display-rail"></div><div class="journey-un"></div></div></div><div class="StickyBoxPlaceholr-grPmrg dxAvXx"></div></div></div></div></div><div class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK kHBDeH grid grid-margs grid-ems-2 PaywallInleBarrierWhWrapperGrid-fyrGfS kLQIUk grid-layout--adrail narrow wi-adrail"><div class="GridItem-buujkM stRKV grid--em grid-layout__ntent"><div class="body body__le-barrier 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class="RubricWrapper-dKmCNX kImuKS bric bric--disvery SummaryItemRubric-dguGKN fYiFyD summary-em__bric"><span class="RubricName-fVtemz cLxcNi">Dept. of Transplants</span></div><a class="SummaryItemHedLk-civM cZPaWG summary-em-trackg__hed-lk summary-em__hed-lk" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-hed-1" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" href="/magaze/2022/08/29/john-and-yoko-take-manhattan" target="_self"><div class="SummaryItemHedBase-hiFYpQ iIjKeM summary-em__hed" data-ttid="SummaryItemHed">John and Yoko Take Manhattan</div></a><div class="SummaryItemAssetContaer-gwhFFH VOyg summary-em__asset-ntaer"><a class="SummaryItemImageLk-dshqxb USLvL summary-em__image-lk summary-em-trackg__image-lk" href="/magaze/2022/08/29/john-and-yoko-take-manhattan" aria-hidn="te" tabx="-1" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-image-1" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" target="_self"><span class="SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB rponsive-asset SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image"><div data-tt="aspect-rat-ntaer" class="AspectRatContaer-bJHpJz jMoLpX"><div class="aspect-rat--overlay-ntaer"><picture class="RponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO dUOtEa SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image rponsive-image"><noscript><source media="(max-width: 767px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w, 640w" siz="100vw"/><source media="(m-width: 768px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w" siz="100vw"/><img alt="John and Yoko Take Manhattan" class="RponsiveImageContaer-eybHBd fptoWY rponsive-image__image" src="></noscript></picture></div></div></span></a></div><div class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ SummaryItemDek-CRfsi iUEiRd jxOIpm cPtisA summary-em__k">From a big bed their Wt Village stud, the former Beatle and his artist wife (“a three-tatami woman,” acrdg to Lennon) talk about their adopted cy (Ono says has “more Jews than Tel Aviv”) and sheddg their posssns.</div><div class="SummaryItemByleWrapper-boCfbi hYsZi summary-em__byle-date-in"><div class="SummaryItemBaseByle-fFbXkY cgDBtc summary-em__byle"><div class="summary-em__byle__ntent"><div data-ttid="BylWrapper" class="BylWrapper-KIudk irTIfE byl"><p class="ByleWrapper-jWHrLH dSEWiO byle byl__byle" data-ttid="ByleWrapper" emProp="thor" emType="><span emProp="name" class="ByleNamWrapper-jbHncj fuDQVo"><span data-ttid="ByleName" class="ByleName-kwmrLn cYaBaU byle__name"><span class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ BylePreamble-iJolpQ iUEiRd jslZfG gnILss byle__preamble">By </span>Hendrik Hertzberg</span></span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="SummaryItemWrapper-iwvBff hlYhBH summary-em summary-em--article summary-em--no-in summary-em--text-align-left summary-em--layout-placement-text-below-sktop-only summary-em--layout-posn-image-right summary-em--layout-proportns-33-66 summary-em--si-by-si-align-center summary-em--si-by-si-image-right-mobile-false summary-em--standard SummaryCollectnGridSummaryItem-WColm fvDIAb" role="button" tabx="0"><div class="SummaryItemAssetContaer-gwhFFH VOyg summary-em__asset-ntaer"><a class="SummaryItemImageLk-dshqxb USLvL summary-em__image-lk summary-em-trackg__image-lk" href="/magaze/1995/06/26/a-diamond-to-cut-new-york" aria-hidn="te" tabx="-1" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-image-2" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" target="_self"><span class="SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB rponsive-asset SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image"><div data-tt="aspect-rat-ntaer" class="AspectRatContaer-bJHpJz jMoLpX"><div class="aspect-rat--overlay-ntaer"><picture class="RponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO dUOtEa SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image rponsive-image"><noscript><source media="(max-width: 767px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w, 640w" siz="100vw"/><source media="(m-width: 768px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w" siz="100vw"/><img alt="A Diamond to Cut New York" class="RponsiveImageContaer-eybHBd fptoWY rponsive-image__image" src="></noscript></picture></div></div></span></a></div><div class="SummaryItemContent-eiDYMl ldWYvC summary-em__ntent"><div class="RubricWrapper-dKmCNX kImuKS bric bric--disvery SummaryItemRubric-dguGKN fYiFyD summary-em__bric"><span class="RubricName-fVtemz cLxcNi">Journals</span></div><a class="SummaryItemHedLk-civM cZPaWG summary-em-trackg__hed-lk summary-em__hed-lk" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-hed-2" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" href="/magaze/1995/06/26/a-diamond-to-cut-new-york" target="_self"><div class="SummaryItemHedBase-hiFYpQ iIjKeM summary-em__hed" data-ttid="SummaryItemHed">A Diamond to Cut New York</div></a><div class="SummaryItemAssetContaer-gwhFFH VOyg summary-em__asset-ntaer"><a class="SummaryItemImageLk-dshqxb USLvL summary-em__image-lk summary-em-trackg__image-lk" href="/magaze/1995/06/26/a-diamond-to-cut-new-york" aria-hidn="te" tabx="-1" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-image-2" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" target="_self"><span class="SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB rponsive-asset SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image"><div data-tt="aspect-rat-ntaer" class="AspectRatContaer-bJHpJz jMoLpX"><div class="aspect-rat--overlay-ntaer"><picture class="RponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO dUOtEa SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image rponsive-image"><noscript><source media="(max-width: 767px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w, 640w" siz="100vw"/><source media="(m-width: 768px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w" siz="100vw"/><img alt="A Diamond to Cut New York" class="RponsiveImageContaer-eybHBd fptoWY rponsive-image__image" src="></noscript></picture></div></div></span></a></div><div class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ SummaryItemDek-CRfsi iUEiRd jxOIpm cPtisA summary-em__k">“I am still so amazed at the brazenns of people who only remember you when you’ve gone to your fourth prtg.”</div><div class="SummaryItemByleWrapper-boCfbi hYsZi summary-em__byle-date-in"><div class="SummaryItemBaseByle-fFbXkY cgDBtc summary-em__byle"><div class="summary-em__byle__ntent"><div data-ttid="BylWrapper" class="BylWrapper-KIudk irTIfE byl"><p class="ByleWrapper-jWHrLH dSEWiO byle byl__byle" data-ttid="ByleWrapper" emProp="thor" emType="><span emProp="name" class="ByleNamWrapper-jbHncj fuDQVo"><span data-ttid="ByleName" class="ByleName-kwmrLn cYaBaU byle__name"><span class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ BylePreamble-iJolpQ iUEiRd jslZfG gnILss byle__preamble">By </span>Dawn Powell</span></span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="SummaryItemWrapper-iwvBff hlYhBH summary-em summary-em--ARTICLE summary-em--no-in summary-em--text-align-left summary-em--layout-placement-text-below-sktop-only summary-em--layout-posn-image-right summary-em--layout-proportns-33-66 summary-em--si-by-si-align-center summary-em--si-by-si-image-right-mobile-false summary-em--standard SummaryCollectnGridSummaryItem-WColm fvDIAb" role="button" tabx="0"><div class="SummaryItemAssetContaer-gwhFFH VOyg summary-em__asset-ntaer"><a class="SummaryItemImageLk-dshqxb USLvL summary-em__image-lk summary-em-trackg__image-lk" href=" aria-hidn="te" tabx="-1" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-image-3" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" target="_self"><span class="SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB rponsive-asset SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image"><div data-tt="aspect-rat-ntaer" class="AspectRatContaer-bJHpJz jMoLpX"><div class="aspect-rat--overlay-ntaer"><picture class="RponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO dUOtEa SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image rponsive-image"><noscript><source media="(max-width: 767px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w, 640w" siz="100vw"/><source media="(m-width: 768px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w" siz="100vw"/><img alt="The Inventn of a Neighborhood" class="RponsiveImageContaer-eybHBd fptoWY rponsive-image__image" src="></noscript></picture></div></div></span></a></div><div class="SummaryItemContent-eiDYMl ldWYvC summary-em__ntent"><div class="RubricWrapper-dKmCNX kImuKS bric bric--disvery SummaryItemRubric-dguGKN fYiFyD summary-em__bric"><span class="RubricName-fVtemz cLxcNi">Letter om Brooklyn</span></div><a class="SummaryItemHedLk-civM cZPaWG summary-em-trackg__hed-lk summary-em__hed-lk" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-hed-3" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" href=" target="_self"><div class="SummaryItemHedBase-hiFYpQ iIjKeM summary-em__hed" data-ttid="SummaryItemHed">The Inventn of a Neighborhood</div></a><div class="SummaryItemAssetContaer-gwhFFH VOyg summary-em__asset-ntaer"><a class="SummaryItemImageLk-dshqxb USLvL summary-em__image-lk summary-em-trackg__image-lk" href=" aria-hidn="te" tabx="-1" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-image-3" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" target="_self"><span class="SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB rponsive-asset SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image"><div data-tt="aspect-rat-ntaer" class="AspectRatContaer-bJHpJz jMoLpX"><div class="aspect-rat--overlay-ntaer"><picture class="RponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO dUOtEa SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image rponsive-image"><noscript><source media="(max-width: 767px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w, 640w" siz="100vw"/><source media="(m-width: 768px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w" siz="100vw"/><img alt="The Inventn of a Neighborhood" class="RponsiveImageContaer-eybHBd fptoWY rponsive-image__image" src="></noscript></picture></div></div></span></a></div><div class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ SummaryItemDek-CRfsi iUEiRd jxOIpm cPtisA summary-em__k">In the early years of Brooklyn’s gentrifitn, a 1977 <em>New Yorker</em> piece by Jervis Anrson ptured the procs a eeze-ame. Those he terviewed were my neighbors.</div><div class="SummaryItemByleWrapper-boCfbi hYsZi summary-em__byle-date-in"><div class="SummaryItemBaseByle-fFbXkY cgDBtc summary-em__byle"><div class="summary-em__byle__ntent"><div data-ttid="BylWrapper" class="BylWrapper-KIudk irTIfE byl"><p class="ByleWrapper-jWHrLH dSEWiO byle byl__byle" data-ttid="ByleWrapper" emProp="thor" emType="><span emProp="name" class="ByleNamWrapper-jbHncj fuDQVo"><span data-ttid="ByleName" class="ByleName-kwmrLn cYaBaU byle__name"><span class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ BylePreamble-iJolpQ iUEiRd jslZfG gnILss byle__preamble">By </span>Jonathan Lethem</span></span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="SummaryItemWrapper-iwvBff hlYhBH summary-em summary-em--ARTICLE summary-em--no-in summary-em--text-align-left summary-em--layout-placement-text-below-sktop-only summary-em--layout-posn-image-right summary-em--layout-proportns-33-66 summary-em--si-by-si-align-center summary-em--si-by-si-image-right-mobile-false summary-em--standard SummaryCollectnGridSummaryItem-WColm fvDIAb" role="button" tabx="0"><div class="SummaryItemAssetContaer-gwhFFH VOyg summary-em__asset-ntaer"><a class="SummaryItemImageLk-dshqxb USLvL summary-em__image-lk summary-em-trackg__image-lk" href=" aria-hidn="te" tabx="-1" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-image-4" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" target="_self"><span class="SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB rponsive-asset SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image"><div data-tt="aspect-rat-ntaer" class="AspectRatContaer-bJHpJz jMoLpX"><div class="aspect-rat--overlay-ntaer"><picture class="RponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO dUOtEa SummaryItemRponsiveAsset-hjGIGg egpoQR summary-em__image rponsive-image"><noscript><source media="(max-width: 767px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w, 640w" siz="100vw"/><source media="(m-width: 768px)" srcSet=" 120w, 240w, 320w" siz="100vw"/><img alt="Jam Thurber’s “New Tricks”" class="RponsiveImageContaer-eybHBd fptoWY rponsive-image__image" src="></noscript></picture></div></div></span></a></div><div class="SummaryItemContent-eiDYMl ldWYvC summary-em__ntent"><div class="RubricWrapper-dKmCNX kImuKS bric bric--disvery SummaryItemRubric-dguGKN fYiFyD summary-em__bric"><span class="RubricName-fVtemz cLxcNi">Cover Story</span></div><a class="SummaryItemHedLk-civM cZPaWG summary-em-trackg__hed-lk summary-em__hed-lk" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-hed-4" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" href=" target="_self"><div class="SummaryItemHedBase-hiFYpQ iIjKeM summary-em__hed" data-ttid="SummaryItemHed">Jam Thurber’s “New Tricks”</div></a><div class="SummaryItemAssetContaer-gwhFFH VOyg summary-em__asset-ntaer"><a class="SummaryItemImageLk-dshqxb USLvL summary-em__image-lk summary-em-trackg__image-lk" href=" aria-hidn="te" tabx="-1" data-ponent-type="recirc-river" data-recirc-id="em-image-4" data-recirc-pattern="summary-em" target="_self"><span 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