Kafka Was the Rage

by Anatole Broyard

  I had always believed, perhaps sentimentally, that lovemaking clarified things, that people came to understand each other through it. Yet it didn’t work that way with Sheri—in fact, she grew more mysterious to me all the time.

  She made love the way she talked—by breaking down the grammar and the rhythms of sex. Young men tend to make love monotonously, but Sheri took my monotony and developed variations on it, as if she were composing a fugue. If I was a piston, she was Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine.

  She was like one of those modern black jazz singers who works against the melody and ignores the natural line ends. Most people agree on some kind of rhythm in sex, but Sheri refused all my attempts at coordination. She never had orgasms—she said she didn’t want them. I did want them, but I had to get used to arriving at them in a new way. Instead of building or mounting to orgasm, I descended to it. It was like a collapsing of structures, like a building falling down. I remember thinking once that it was the opposite of premature ejaculation.

  I had conceived of lovemaking as a sort of asking and answering of questions, but with us it only led to further questions, until we seemed to be locked in a philosophical debate. Instead of the proverbial sadness after sex, I felt something like a semantic despair.

  Our sexual progress reminded me of a simultaneous translation. But then, every once in a while, we would speak the same language; she would allow us to chime, to strike the same note at the same time, and it was as if I were suddenly acoustical, resounding, loud in the silence.

  When we stayed home in the evenings, I would sit with a book in my lap and watch her paint. But if she glanced around and saw me reading, she would put down her brush and come over and turn all her art on me. She distrusted books. I never saw her read one. I think she believed I might find something in them that would give me an advantage over her, or that I might use against her.

  I felt the same way about her painting. She was an abstract painter and I couldn’t follow her there. She left me outside, like a dog that you tie to a parking meter when you go into a store. I had never been comfortable with abstract painting. I had no talent for abstraction, didn’t see the need for it, or the beauty of it. Like liberal politics, it eliminated so many things I liked.

  Yet if I could understand her paintings, I thought, our sex would be better. We would exist in the same picture plane, pose for each other’s portraits, mingle our forms and colors, make compositions. We would be like two people walking through a gallery or museum, exclaiming over the same things.

  I began to read up on abstract painting. In the library in the Museum of Modern Art, I rummaged through the shelves, studying for my new life. I had come to think that modern art was an initiation into that life, like the hazing before you get into a fraternity. When I was at Brooklyn College, everyone urged me to join the Communist party, but I refused because I thought it was an uninteresting quarrel with the real. Modern art, though, was a quarrel that appealed to me more. Even if I never got to like it, I enjoyed the terms of the argument. I was impressed by the restless dissatisfaction, the aggressiveness, ingenuity, and pretension of all the theories.

  I discovered that you could always find your own life reflected in art, even if it was distorted or discolored. There was a sentence, for example, in a book on Surrealism that stuck in my mind: “Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

  2

  Taking advantage of the GI Bill, which paid my tuition and gave me a monthly allowance, I enrolled at the New School for Social Research on West Twelfth Street. I’d had a couple of semesters at Brooklyn College before going into the army, but I was bored because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with what I was learning. I couldn’t see any immediate use for it. But now going to school was part of the postwar romance. Studying was almost as good as art. The world was our studio.

  Like the Village itself, the New School was at its best in 1946. After a war, civilization feels like a luxury, and people went to the New School the way you go to a party, almost like going abroad. Education was chic and sexy in those days. It was not yet open to the public.

  The people in the lobby of the New School were excited, expectant, dressed to the teeth. They struck poses, examined one another with approval. They had a blind date with culture, and anything could happen. Young, attractive, hip, they were the best Americans. For local color, there was a sprinkling of bohemians and young men just out of the service who were still wearing their khakis and fatigues, as young matrons in the suburbs go shopping in their tennis dresses.

  Known as the “University in Exile,” the New School had taken in a lot of professors—Jewish and non-Jewish—who had fled from Hitler on the same boats as the psychoanalysts. Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country. While the psychoanalysts listened in their private offices—with all the detachment of those who had really known anxiety—to Americans retailing their dreams, the professors analyzed those same dreams wholesale in the packed classrooms of the New School.

  All the courses I took were about what’s wrong: what’s wrong with the government, with the family, with interpersonal relations and intrapersonal relations—what’s wrong with our dreams, our loves, our jobs, our perceptions and conceptions, our esthetics, the human condition itself.

  They were furious, the professors, at the ugly turn the world had taken and they stalked the halls of the New School as if it were a concentration camp where we were the victims and they were the warders, the storm troopers of humanism. The building resounded with guttural cries: kunstwissenschaft, zeitgeist and weltanschauung, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, schadenfreude, schwarmerei. Their accents were so impenetrable that some of them seemed to speak in tongues and the students understood hardly a word.

  We admired the German professors. We had won the fight against fascism and now, with their help, we would defeat all the dark forces in the culture and the psyche. As a reaction to our victory, sensitive Americans had entered an apologetic phase in our national life and there was nothing the professors could say that was too much. We came out of class with dueling scars.

  I took a course in the psychology of American culture, given by Erich Fromm. Though he had just arrived, he knew America better than we did, because it impinged on him. His Escape from Freedom, which had recently been published, was one of those paeans of lyrical pessimism that Germans specialize in, like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Spengler. Sitting on a platform behind a desk, like a judge in criminal court, he passed his remorseless judgment on us. We were unwilling, he said, to accept the anguish of freedom. According to him, we feared freedom, saw it as madness, epistemology run amok. In the name of freedom, we accepted everything he said. We accepted it because we liked the sound of it—no one knew then that we would turn out to be right in trying to escape from freedom.

  Fromm was short and plump. His jaws were broader than his forehead and he reminded me of a brooding hen. Yet, like everyone else, I sat spellbound through his lectures. I’ll never forget the night he described a typical American family going for a pointless drive on a Sunday afternoon, joylessly eating ice cream at a roadhouse on the highway and then driving heavily home. Fromm was one of the first—perhaps the very first—to come out against pointlessness. It was a historic moment, like Einstein discovering relativity or Heidegger coming up against nothingness.

  I also studied Gestalt psychology with Rudolf Arnheim, but here I confess I was disappointed. It seemed to me that Germans were sometimes stunned into a kind of stupor by an ordinary insight, which they would then try to elevate into a philosophy or a system. Colliding with a modest fact in the midst of their abstraction, they just couldn’t get over it.

  The Gestalt psychologists had discovered that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—something everybody already knew—and Arnheim spent most of the semester demonstrating this. I
kept waiting for him to go on, but he just gave us more experiments, more evidence. It all depended on rats. We never talked about people—only rats. In the advanced courses, it was apes.

  Max Wertheimer, the father of Gestalt psychology, made a guest appearance in the class. He was a small man, dressed in a frock coat, and he wore his hair en brosse. The high point of his lecture was a demonstration of requiredness, a key term in Gestalt thinking. It meant, if I understood him, that each thing implied other things, or a context, something like a counterpoint of structures. He showed us what he meant with a little experiment of his own. First he taught us a complicated African hand clap, and then when he had us clapping away, he himself set up a weird howling accompaniment.

  I attended a special lecture in the auditorium, given by Karen Horney, on the psychology of women. Like Fromm, Horney was a Freudian revisionist. In one of her books, she had said that, in a sense, the neurotic was healthier than the so-called normal person, because he “protested.” Protesting was like testifying. Since everyone at the New School proudly considered him- or herself neurotic—it wasn’t respectable not to be—Horney’s message was just what we wanted to hear.

  I don’t remember much of the lecture, but it had an unforgettable aftermath. A woman with a fur coat draped over her shoulders rose from her seat and asked a question. But what about penis envy? she said. You haven’t said anything about penis envy.

  There was a shocked silence. It was like the time, when I was a child, that someone threw a stink bomb in a neighborhood movie house. Horney just sat there on the platform without speaking, gazing at the woman like an analyst contemplating a hopeless patient she had taken against her better judgment.

  Her face seemed to swell. She raised one hand above her head and then the other, as if she would try to climb up out of the auditorium and the New School. Then, closing her hands into fists, she slammed them down on the desk. What about it? she said. Her voice rose to a shriek, What about it? I don’t have a penis. Can you give me one?

  Later, when I was back at the apartment, sitting in my usual chair and watching Sheri paint, I thought about Horney, and it seemed to me that there were lots of other, better things she could have said to the woman. She could have said, Why does everyone think it’s so terrific to have a penis? I myself, for example, had a penis, but it didn’t help me now to imagine what went on in Sheri’s mind as she filled in a ragged area of the canvas with muddy green paint. It seemed to me that a penis was a very primitive instrument for dealing with life. Besides, Horney was wrong. Sheri did have a penis—mine belonged to her more than it did to me.

  3

  I hadn’t been living with Sheri very long when Dick Gilman tried to take her away from me. There was nothing underhanded about Dick. He simply came over to the apartment one night and explained that I was not the right person for Sheri, and that he was.

  His opening remarks were so elegant, so hermeneutic, that I didn’t realize at first that he was talking about me. Dick hardly ever referred to real persons, and my initial impression was that he was describing an unsatisfactory character in a novel.

  When I finally understood what he was doing, I was more surprised than angry, because I thought of Dick as a friend. This was no way for a friend to behave. Yet what he said sounded just like the friendly discussions of books we carried on in Washington Square or in the San Remo. And it was this blurring of the boundaries that confused me.

  Dick was odd in a lot of ways. In his reading, for example, he was a serial monogamist. He’d fall in love with a particular author and remain faithful to him alone, reading everything by and about him. He would become that author, talk like him, think like him, dress like him if possible. If he could find out what his current favorite had eaten and drunk, Dick would eat and drink them, too. He took on his politics, his causes, his eccentricities. At one point in his D. H. Lawrence phase—this was after his Yeats and Auden phases—Dick actually went to Mexico and tried to find Lawrence’s footprints in the dust.

  He was a very fast reader, so these affairs came and went fairly quickly. No author can survive that kind of identification for long. When he came to the apartment, Dick was still in his Lawrence phase, so perhaps he saw himself stealing Frieda from Ernest Weekley. Could it be that he had fallen for Sheri as he had for Lawrence and Yeats and Auden?

  All the same, Dick was a formidable rival—a brilliant talker, an attractive man. He might even have been handsome if his face had not been just a bit vainglorious with all the books he’d read. As Harold Norse, a Village poet, said, “Dick was only twenty-one and he had read more books than Hemingway.”

  He had told me he was coming to see us and I had thought this meant he wanted to be better friends, because he was rather standoffish and had never visited us before. Now that he was here, I offered him a beer and asked him to take a chair, but he refused both, like a policeman who doesn’t drink or sit down while on duty.

  He began with a prologue, or prologomenon. He had examined his motives, he said, and was satisfied that they were disinterested. For a moment I thought he was going to say that, like art, he was a mirror held up to nature. What he did say was that I was not serious. There was, he said, an incongruity in my relation to Sheri. At that time we were all very much under the influence of the idea of incongruity in art. But while incongruity was good in art, it was, apparently, bad in life.

  We were in the kitchen. Out of a kind of tact, Dick hadn’t advanced farther into the apartment. I had taken a chair and Sheri leaned on the metal cover of the bathtub while Dick paced back and forth between the sink and the stove. Since they were only three or four steps apart, he kept whirling around. He was like a lecturer in front of a class, or a peripatetic philosopher. No doubt he had read Nietzsche, who said that the best thoughts come while walking.

  Using words like unconscionable, he sounded as if he was recommending himself to Sheri more as a critic than a lover. He gesticulated a lot, chopping the air with stiffened fingers, like someone helping to park a car. He had a rather high, cracked voice—the voice of the brilliant talker—and I listened to it with a detached fascination as he explained, in effect, that his sensibility was bigger than mine.

  How little he knew about us! He actually saw me as trifling with Sheri, taking advantage of her. As he went on, building his sentences, piling up clauses, I began to get angry. The hell with this, I thought. I ought to punch him in the mouth. But I couldn’t. He had turned the situation into a seminar, and you can’t punch people in a seminar. Besides, he talked so well—it would be like punching literature in the mouth. And he had a disarming way of appealing to me—to me!—to confirm a point. He was asking me to testify against myself.

  Yet even though he addressed himself to me, I don’t think he saw me as he marched back and forth ticking off my shortcomings. He was too caught up in his arguments. I was too—they were so persuasive that I began to believe them myself. Yes, I thought, it was probably true—I wasn’t right for Sheri. She was too much for me. But that was why I wanted her, why I had to keep her. As Dick described the life she might have with him, I resolved that, if she stayed with me, I would do all the things he was enumerating.

  At last, in a splendid peroration, Dick wound up with several striking tropes, like the final orchestral cadences of a classical symphony. He was breathing hard and smiling a little, as if at a job well done. It was impossible to be angry. God bless him, he thought of a woman as a kind of book.

  In the silence that followed, it seemed to me that someone should have applauded. I looked at Sheri, who hadn’t moved all this time. Her face was unreadable. She was a marvelous actress and knew how to hold the moment. Then, very deliberately, she changed her position a little in leaning on the bathtub, so that she was in an infinitesimally more nonchalant attitude. I was the first to catch on, and when I started laughing, Dick slammed out of the apartment. He could still be heard booming down the iron stairs when I lifted Sheri onto the bathtub cover.

  When y
ou look back over your life, the thing that amazes you most is your original capacity to believe. To grow older is to lose this capacity, to stop believing, or to become unable to believe. When Nemecio Zanarte came to the apartment a couple of weeks later and repeated Dick’s performance, I was able to believe at first that he too had simply been struck by Sheri, like Dick.

  Nemecio was a Chilean painter. He was tall, dark, thin, and very handsome in the stark, suffering, aristocratic way that only pure Spaniards seem to have. His high, narrow nose and his deep eye sockets were as superbly carved as an El Greco portrait of a cardinal or pope. I imagined that even Nemecio’s feet were beautiful, like Christ’s in a twelfth-century painted wooden crucifixion.

  His voice was soft, deep, and cultivated and his manners were a history of civilization. Yet here he was, like a priest of the Inquisition, invading what was now my home, telling me that, as a gentleman, it was my duty to remove myself and give Sheri her freedom. His English was not fluent and he said “give to Sheri her freedom.”

  I felt like a man being persecuted. While Dick might be explained as a kind of literary mistake—a misreading?—Nemecio could not. For this exquisitely polite man to do what he was doing, my failings must have been truly flagrant. What was it about me, I wondered, that inspired everyone to interfere in my life? Did I really behave so badly? Could it be that people actually saw Sheri as a quattrocento Madonna?

  At least Nemecio had the decency to appear uncomfortable. Personally, he said, he was fond of me—it was not a question of that, but of symmetry. There was not the necessary symmetry between Sheri and myself. His long, graceful fingers moved as he spoke, as if he was trying on gloves. Everything he said could have come right out of Lorca, only his imperfect English spoiled the effect. “Why you don’t go?” he said. “As a gentleman, you must go.” He kept falling back on that “Why you don’t go?” As a speaker, he was not in Dick’s class.