Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir by Anatole Broyard

Author:Anatole Broyard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Biography, History
ISBN: 0679781269
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1993-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

12

I found an apartment at last, on Prince Street between Sullivan and Thompson, which was then the south-eastern edge of the Village. It was a tenement like Sheri’s, built for immigrants, old and shabby, a tiny top-floor walk-up divided into three little boxes like walk-in closets. It was cramped and dingy, but I didn’t care. I would make it my own, turn it into a home, a studio, as we used to say, a magic word. I gave the super fifty dollars, bought a sterilized secondhand bed, and moved in. Now, I said to myself, I can start to live. I was always starting to live, another beginning, a final beginning.

I had looked forward so much to having an apartment of my own, had carried the idea around with me so fondly all through the army, that I was astonished to discover, after my first few days there, that I was lonely. I couldn’t understand how this could be. It was one thing to feel lonely in Brooklyn or in the army, but how could I be lonely in my own place in Greenwich Village? I hadn’t yet realized that loneliness was not so much a feeling as a fate. It was loneliness that walked the streets of the Village and filled the bars, loneliness that made it seem such a lively place.

Looking back at the late 1940s, it seems to me now that Americans were confronting their loneliness for the first time. Loneliness was like the morning after the war, like a great hangover. The war had broken the rhythm of American life, and when we tried to pick it up again, we couldn’t find it—it wasn’t there. It was as if a great bomb, an explosion of consciousness, had gone off in American life, shattering everything. Before that we had been too busy just getting along, too conventional to be lonely. The world had been smaller and we had filled it.

I thought of Sheri and wondered whether, with all the trouble she gave me, she wasn’t better than loneliness. Yet I had been lonely with her too—I saw that now. She wasn’t company in the ordinary sense. I was lonely between bouts of desire, between distractions. There was no peace with her. She was like a recurrent temptation to commit a crime.

Whoever had the apartment before me had painted the walls in wide vertical stripes in three different shades of blue. I lay on my sterilized bed and felt blue too, every shade of blue. It shook my faith. It was my first great disappointment as an adult, my first postwar defeat. I rallied briefly and painted the walls grass green. I tacked burlap on the windows, but I was still lonely. It was a green loneliness now.

After a while, I went to Sheri’s apartment to get some clothes and books I had left there. I picked a time when she wouldn’t be home—I knew that if I saw her we might start all over again.

Going back there was more of a shock than I had expected.

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