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The Alchemy of Youth
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11814 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1994 |
1,640 Words |
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Alexander Bloom
Alexander Bloom is professor of history at Wheaton College in
Massachusetts. He is the author of Prodigal Sons: The New York
Intellectuals and Their World (1986) and the
forthcoming "Takin' It to the Streets": America in the 1960s.
He is working on a book titled Red Diaper Babies: Growing Up
on the American Left. |
KAFKA WAS THE RAGE
A Greenwich Village Memoir
Anatole Broyard
New York: Crown/Southern, 1993
160 pp., $18.00
For young writers and intellectuals, the best time to have arrived in Greenwich Village always seemed to be with the previous generation. During the thirties, the great days of the pre-World War I Village scene became the stuff of folk mythology. In the posh-World War II years, William Barrett wrote that the "Village of the Twenties has vanished altogether, its great crusade for personal and sexual freedom against older puritanical America had been fought and won."
In 1961, Lionel Abel recalled that during the Depression years, "all that was essentially the city was bounded by Bleeker and Fourteenth Street, by Second Avenue and Greenwich Street . . . . New York was Greenwich Village." The age in which one lives never seems as exciting as one in the past. But as Murray Kempton observed, "If you live in New York long enough, what you thought was an age of lead will look like an age of gold."
New York in the post-World War II years has turned into just such an age of gold. Kafka Was the Rage, a slim memoir by the late Anatole Broyard, begins, "I think there's a great nostalgia for life in New York City, especially in Greenwich Village in the period just after World War II." For Dan Wakefield, another recent memoirist, "Whatever we've done was shaped by the fortunate fact that we started out in the most exciting city of its era, a mecca that, like Paris in the twenties, exists now only in memory. Its naming now seems legendary: New York in the fifties."
Paeans to a lost life
What is striking about these recent paeans to a lost life is that, at the time, American life--especially for intellectuals--seemed an age of lead. This was the era of television, suburbs, philistines, and "eggheads." For Broyard, in hindsight, it was "a good time--perhaps the best time--in the twentieth century."
Broyard's recollections and observations are fragmentary and personal. He put down the writing of this book when he was diagnosed with cancer, turning instead to his much-heralded Intoxicated by My Illness (1992). He never finished his memoir. The first two parts now
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