Kafka Was the Rage (4 page)

My outfit, a stevedore battalion, had arrived right after MacArthur, and my first job as a dock officer was
to scrape a solid crust of shit off a dock a quarter of a mile long. I didn’t realize at first that it was human shit. As I figured it out later, Japanese stevedores and embarking soldiers had had no time for niceties toward the end and had simply squatted down wherever they stood. The entire dock was covered with a layer that was as hard as clay. The rain and traffic had packed it down.

I had my own company of 220 men to supervise the job and I was given 1,500 Japanese who would actually chop the stuff away. We provided them with axes, shovels, sledgehammers, picks, crowbars—whatever we could find. We had no bulldozers. They chopped and scraped for three days and then the Medical Corps hosed down the dock with chemicals.

It was on this same dock, where you could still smell the chemicals, that I was working the night I got the idea of the bookstore. I had two gangs unloading the forward hatches of a ship and I was leaning on the rail, under the yellowish overhead spots. It was about three o’clock in the morning and I felt a million miles from home, from anywhere. For something to do, I was thinking about books, trying to see if I could quote passages or whole poems the way some people can.

Mostly it was only single lines I remembered, perhaps because I was tired. Wallace Stevens was my favorite poet and I murmured a few scraps from his books to myself: “Too many waltzes have ended.” “Apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.” “The windy sky cries out a literate despair.” “These days of disinheritance we feast on human heads.” It was reassuring to think, in the middle of the night in this foreign place, that there were people in the world who would take the trouble
to write things like that. This was another, wonderful kind of craziness, at the opposite end from the craziness of the army.

We were unloading boxes of condensed milk and as I watched a pallet swing over the rail, I thought that when I got home I would open a bookshop in the Village. It would be a secondhand bookshop, specializing in twentieth-century literature. I remember that the idea made me feel warm. I took my hands out of my pockets and squeezed them together. To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world.

After a couple of months of looking, I bought out an old Italian junk dealer on Cornelia Street. I paid him three hundred dollars and agreed to move his stock to a new location. I hired a truck and we carried out old boilers, radiators, bathtubs, sinks, pipes of all sizes, and miscellaneous bits and pieces of metal.

Nineteen forty-six was a good time for a secondhand bookshop, because everything was out of print and the paperback revolution had not yet arrived. People had missed books during the war, and there was a sense of reunion, like meeting old friends or lovers. Now there was time for everything, and buying books became a popular postwar thing to do. For young people who had just left home to go live in the Village, books were like dolls or teddy bears or family portraits. They populated a room.

When I left Brooklyn to live in the Village, I felt as if I had acquired a new set of relatives, like a surprising number of uncles I had never met before, men who lived in odd places, sometimes abroad, who had shunned family life and been shunned in turn, who were
somewhere between black sheep and prodigal sons of a paradoxical kind. An aura of scandal, or at least of ambiguity, hovered over these uncles, as if they had run away with someone’s wife or daughter. There was a flaw in their past, some kind of unhealthiness, even a hint of insanity.

These uncles were, of course, my favorite authors, the writers I most admired. I felt them waiting, almost calling out to me. They were more real than anything I had ever known, real as only imagined things can be, real as dreams that seem so unbearably actual because they are cleansed of all irrelevances. These uncles, these books, moved into the vacuum of my imagination.

They were all the family I had now, all the family I wanted. With them, I could trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions. I could lead a hypothetical life, unencumbered by memory, loyalties, or resentments. The first impulse of adolescence is to wish to be an orphan or an amnesiac. Nobody in the Village had a family. We were all sprung from our own brows, spontaneously generated the way flies were once thought to have originated.

I didn’t yet see the tragedy of my family: I still thought of them as a farce, my laughable past. In my new incarnation, in books I could be halfway heroic, almost tragic. I could be happy, for the first time, in my tragedy.

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books—I’m talking about my friends and myself—went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know
where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance—the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity.

If it hadn’t been for books, we’d have been completely at the mercy of sex. There was hardly anything else powerful enough to distract or deflect us; we’d have been crawling after sex, writhing over it all the time. Books enabled us to see ourselves as characters—yes, we were characters!—and this gave us a bit of control.

Though we read all kinds of books, there were only a handful of writers who were our uncles, our family. For me, it was Kafka, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and Céline. These were the books I liked, the books that I read, and they wouldn’t fill more than a few shelves, so I went over to Fourth Avenue, which was lined with bookshops, and bought books by the titles, the subjects, the bindings, or the publishers. I was given a 20 percent dealer’s discount and I thought I could charge my customers fifty cents or one dollar more for the pleasure of finding these books in a clean,
well-lighted place. Although I had never read Balzac, I bought a fifty-volume uniform edition of his novels in a red binding with gold-edged pages. I got it for only nineteen dollars.

There were people in the Village who had more books than money, and I appealed to them in the literary quarterlies. Like someone buying a dog, I assured them that I’d give their books a good home. But it was an unhappy business, because many of these people suffered from separation anxiety. Those who were depressed by letting their books go tended to devaluate them, while others who were more in the hysterical mode asked such enormous sums that I knew it was their souls they were selling. Pricing an out-of-print book is one of the most poignant forms of criticism.

Seeing how young I was, everyone gave me advice. Get Christopher Caudwell, they said. Get Kenneth Burke, William Empson, F. R. Leavis, Paul Valéry. Get Nathanael West, Céline, Unamuno, Italo Svevo, Hermann Broch,
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
. Edward Dahlberg, Baron Corvo, Djuna Barnes—get them too. But above all, at any cost, I must get Kafka. Kafka was as popular in the Village at that time as Dickens had been in Victorian London. But his books were very difficult to find—they must have been printed in very small editions—and people would rush in wild-eyed, almost foaming at the mouth, willing to pay anything for Kafka.

Literary criticism was enjoying a vogue. As Randall Jarrell said, some people consulted their favorite critic about the conduct of their lives as they had once consulted their clergymen. The war had left a bitter taste, and literary criticism is the art of bitter tastes.

A thin, intense young man with a mustache came into the shop and instructed me in bibliophilic etiquette. A bookshop, he said, should have an almost ecclesiastical atmosphere. There should be an odor, or redolence, of snuffed candles, dryness, desuetude—even contrition. He gazed at the shelves, the floor, the stamped tin ceiling. It’s too clean here, he said, too cheerful.

I had imagined myself like Saint Jerome in his study, bent over his books, with the tamed lion of his conquered restlessness at his feet. My customers would come and go in studious silence, pausing, with averted eyes, to leave the money on my desk. But it didn’t turn out like that. What I hadn’t realized was that, for many people, a bookshop is a place of last resort, a kind of moral flophouse. Many of my customers were the kind of people who go into a bookshop when all other diversions have failed them. Those who had no friends, no pleasures, no resources came to me. They came to read the handwriting on the wall, the bad news. They studied the shelves like people reading the names on a war memorial.

There was something in the way a particular person would take a book from a shelf, the way it was opened and sniffed, that made me want to snatch it away. Others would seize upon a book that was obviously beyond them. I could tell by their faces, their clothes, by their manners, the way they moved, that they’d misread the book or get nothing out of it. The kind of person who is satirized or attacked in a book is often the very person to buy it and pretend to enjoy it. As Mallarmé said, “If a person of average intelligence and insufficient literary preparation opens one of my books and pretends to enjoy it, there has been a mistake. Things must be returned to their places.”

It was the talkers who gave me the most trouble. Like the people who had sold me books, the talkers wanted to sell me their lives, their fictions about themselves, their philosophies. Following the example of the authors on the shelves, infected perhaps by them, they told me of their families, their love affairs, their illusions and disillusionments. I was indignant. I wanted to say, Wait a minute! I’ve already got stories here! Take a look at those shelves!

While I pretended to listen, I asked myself which were more real—theirs, or the stories on the shelves. “The familiar man makes the hero artificial,” Wallace Stevens said. In the commonplaceness of their narratives, some of these talkers anticipated the direction that American fiction would eventually take—away from the heroic, the larger than life, toward the ordinary, the smaller than life.

As they talked on, I thought of all the junk I had carried out of the shop—the boilers, bathtubs, and radiators. These people were bringing it all back—all the clutter, the cast-off odds and ends of their lives. It was more than I had bargained for. Literature was tough enough, with its gaudy sadness, but this miscellany—these heartaches off the street—was too much for me. In the contest between life and literature, life wins every time.

S
heri took me to see Anaïs Nin, who lived in the Village at that time. According to her diary, which was published years later, Anaïs had spiritually adopted Sheri, describing her as the ghost of her own younger self. She spoke of Sheri as a disciple. “So they come,” she wrote, “out of the stories, out of the novels, magnetized by affinities, by similar characters.” Sheri was “an orphaned child of poverty … pleading, hurt, vulnerable, breathless.” “She talks as I write, as if I had created a language for her feelings.”

Anaïs’ apartment was a top-floor walk-up on Thirteenth Street. Everyone Sheri knew lived on top floors, probably because it was cheaper, but I thought of them as struggling to get to the light. Besides Anaïs and her husband, Ian Hugo, a pleasant, self-effacing man, there was a young couple whose names I no longer remember. The young man held a guitar across his knees, but you could see that he would never play it, that it was
just part of a composition, like the guitars in Cubist paintings.

Though I hadn’t yet read anything by Anaïs, I’d heard of her. It was said that she and Henry Miller had once lived on a houseboat on the Seine. Later I would learn that she had attracted Otto Rank, who allegedly trained her as a psychoanalyst, and who asked her to rewrite his almost unreadable books. In New York she had an odd acquaintance with Edmund Wilson. After Mary McCarthy left him, he developed a crush on Anaïs and took her to his apartment, which Mary had stripped of furniture. When he reviewed one of her novels, you could see him struggling between his desire and his taste. As usual, though, she had the last word in her diary. Summarizing their evening together, she said, “He wanted me to help him reconstruct his life, to help him choose a couch…. But I wanted to leave.”

Anaïs was a medium-sized woman with a very pale face, like a Japanese actress. She was classical-looking, in the sense of a form that has become rigidified. Her hair was dark, straight, parted in the middle and pulled back. Her lipstick was precise, her eyebrows shaved off and penciled in, giving the impression that she had written her own face. Her figure was trim but without elasticity, its movements willed and staccato. She was pretty in the way of women in old black-and-white movies. There was a suggestion of the vamp about her, and, in fact, she was later to become a kind of Theda Bara of modern literature.

It was impossible to guess her age. Her teeth looked false and her face had the arbitrary smoothness of one that had been lifted, but I thought this unlikely. It was possible she lifted it herself by the sheer force of her will.

Yet she was impressive in her way, an evocative figure. She reminded me of the melancholy Paris hotels of expatriate writing and I could imagine her, wearing an ambiguous fur, sitting defiantly, or insouciantly, in a café. While I could not imagine her in bed with Henry Miller, that may have been his fault.

There was an aura about her, a sense that she was holding a séance. The atmosphere was charged with her energy. When she gave me her hand and looked searchingly into my eyes, I could feel her projecting an image of herself, one that was part French, part flamenco, part ineffable. When she said, You are Anatole, I immediately became Anatole in a way I hadn’t been before.