Chandler Brossard's Early-50s Greenwich Village Hipster Novel
I'm a fan of Brossard's but not a terribly educated one; of his many books, the only other ones I've read are his second novel, The Bold Saboteurs (1953), which Herodias will republish next year, and As the Wolf Howls at My Door, which Dalkey Archive published in 1992. Herodias publisher Paul Williams tells me I shouldn't feel too bad, though. Who Walk in Darkness has been out of print for 30 years; most of Brossard's books are. "I'd always been aware, vaguely, of who Brossard was, and I knew of The Bold Saboteurs, but I hadn't read him," Williams confesses. It was an antiquarian bookseller in the Midwest who suggested there'd be a market for bringing Brossard's titles back into print. To find out who held the rights, Williams simply started calling Brossards listed in the Manhattan telephone book until he found a daughter, Marie, who administrates her father's estate.
Brossard, who died in 1993, was born in Idaho in 1922 and grew up in DC. He came to New York City as a journalist; he wrote for The New Yorker, Time, various newspapers. Who Walk in Darkness was his first novel. It's been called one of the first Beat novels?it was published in the same year as the other two contenders, John Clellon Holmes' Go and George Mandel's Flee the Angry Strangers (which I've never read; I hear it's about teenage dope addicts). In a sense it's an anti-Beat novel as well, since the lifestyle it portrays isn't a very happy or engaging one. One of the things the book most ably demonstrates is that a life of bohemian indolence, as anyone who's tried living one knows, involves a lot of tedium and boredom.
The flat, declamatory narrative style Brossard adopted for his first novel inevitably reminded some reviewers of Hemingway. But as Steven Moore astutely points out in the introduction, the better analogy is with Camus: in a way, he argues, this could be called the first American Existentialist novel. I also hear echoes in here of the tight-lipped, downbeat narrative style of 50s noir; throw in a cheap hood or a failed heist and there are times when this could be a David Goodis novel.
The book recounts a month in the lives of a group of Village types who refer to themselves as "underground" characters?struggling young writers, affected intellectuals, models of easy virtue, bebop musicians, potheads?and various slumming rich folk who hang around them. The narrator, maintaining a principled struggle to avoid steady work and the gray flannel rat race, doesn't do a hell of a lot from one day to the next. He eats his meals out, drinks his drinks at various Village bars, wanders around Washington Square Park, takes in a movie and, very gradually, almost in spite of himself, starts horning in on an acquaintance's girl. That acquaintance is a lot of things the narrator is not: he's an operator, a suave cad, a live wire, a young literary man on the make, never short on cash. To the slacker narrator, in short, he's a blowhard and a phony. Their battle of wills?between the disaffected moralist and the callous pragmatist?is played out in excruciating slow motion, like a fight between a pair of rutting tortoises. Meanwhile, everybody eats, drinks and strolls around the Village, fighting off the young boho's native inclination to nihilistic apathy, as in this scene:
Harry stopped and took the bottle of Courvoisier from his inside jacket pocket. He took the cap off and handed the bottle to Joan. The warehouse night watchman across the street was staring at us.
"Here's looking at you," Joan said, taking a drink. Harry offered the bottle to me, but I did not feel like a drink just then, so I shook my head. He took a drink and put the bottle back inside his jacket. The night watchman across the street looked at us as we walked up the street. Maybe it was the first time he had ever seen a woman take a drink on the street with two men.
I looked around the place. In the center of the bar a group of young men were clustered around a big blonde girl who was talking a great deal and laughing in shrieks. You could spot the boys a mile away. No good place in town was safe from them any more. They eventually hunted down every good place and then ruined it. Those always-happy young faces?even the middle-aged ones looked nineteen. They were always having such a gay time. They brought the uptown tourists and then eventually the hustlers and the hoods came, too, for their share of the gravy. You could not do anything about them, either. They knew it and they acted very superior about it.
And here's a beatnik party, complete with live bebop band:
Looking around the room, I saw some faces I knew, and waved my hand at them, and then I smelled the charge [marijuana]. Somebody up in the front of the room was blowing it. In the corner of the front of the room near the window a tall thin man was standing over a wire recorder that was taking down the bebop music. A hipster. Another hipster came up to him and I saw him hand the tall one the already lit stick of tea. He inhaled it, sucking in air with the smoke, holding it in, and gave the stick back to the other hipster.
A handful of pivotal scenes?a prizefight, a furtive abortion, a lost weekend at the beach?gradually nudge the narrator out of his studied pose of disconnectedness, toward a pretty conventional salvation in the arms of a good woman. Still, the book doesn't go out with a complacent happy ending, but rather with an abrupt and jarring dislocation that occurs on the very last page?indicating, Brossard later said in interview, that life goes on, a stream of lulls and bumps that has little to do with the neat packaging of a well-turned novel.
Brossard had trouble getting Who Walk In Darkness published. After the manuscript made the rounds of the big New York houses, Raymond Queneau picked it up for the French literary press Gallimard, and recommended it to New Directions here. "Then," Moore relates in the introduction, "Delmore Schwartz stepped in." Schwartz, who was an adviser to New Directions, recognized that several of the novel's characters were based on acquaintances of Brossard's: William Gaddis, Stanley Gould, Anatole Broyard and Milton Klonsky, for instance. The latter two threatened to sue New Directions. Brossard was forced to make changes (though not to the French edition), one of which was awfully crippling. In the original, the opening line was, "People said Henry Porter was a 'passed' Negro." In the version as published (and in subsequent English language editions for 20 years), this was changed to the terribly weak, "People said Henry Porter was an illegitimate."
Why the substitution? The character of Porter was the one based on Broyard. And the last thing Broyard wanted to be seen as in public was a "passed" Negro. Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote a famous essay about it in The New Yorker in 1996 (collected the following year in his Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man), cleverly titled "The Passing of Anatole Broyard." Broyard was a leading mandarin of American literature and a gatekeeper of High Culture at The New York Times for several decades (he died in 1990), giving off impeccably WASPish upper-crustian vibes; think of him as a cross between Dwight Macdonald and Gore Vidal. Thing is, he was indeed a light-skinned Negro, born in New Orleans and raised in Bed-Stuy, a past he went to great lengths to conceal all his life, though he was always dogged by rumors about it. By the time he entered postwar Village society he was, in the parlance of the day, "passing" for white. As a black contemporary put it, "He was black when he got into the subway in Brooklyn, but as soon as he got out at West 4th Street he became white." His star was just on the rise when Brossard tried to blow his cover, albeit fictionally, in 1952.
Thus the threatened lawsuit and the disastrous alterations to the text, which wasn't righted until a paperback edition of 1972. This new edition follows that corrected version.
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Williams considers Brossard's oeuvre literary-hipster territory just waiting to be rediscovered. "I'm hoping to reintroduce him into the downtown trade market," he tells me. He'll republish The Bold Saboteurs in January, and is "in a process of discovery myself. I'm basically just ordering out-of-print copies and reading each book to see whether or not it interests me. I've got a few more up the line." There's "tons of fiction and nonfiction" by Brossard that could be reissued. Once Williams gets a few titles in the catalog, he hopes to stimulate a Brossard revival in college literature courses.
Williams founded Herodias in 1997, after 16 years in bookselling for larger organizations. He started out opening sites for the discount chain Encore Books. In 1986 he landed what was then maybe the prestige job in bookstores: general manager of the landmark Doubleday shop on 5th Ave. "That was a great store. Breakfast at Tiffany's and all that. What was unique was the promotional power of those windowcases... We sold 4500 copies of Prince of Tides from that store. We sold 7500 copies of Spycatcher... This was during the time when Nelson Doubleday still owned the company. We used to have publishing parties up in the suite. It was the end of an era."
After that he was in sales at Ballantine, Grove/Weidenfeld, Rizzoli and Routledge, among others, before starting his own small press in '97, working out of the East Village. He puts out about 10 books a year. He's got high hopes for another new title, an alternative-history novel called Custer's Luck, in which Custer survives Little Big Horn and goes on to become president. At the weightier end of the catalog, the upcoming Art, Music and Education as Strategies for Survival: Theresienstadt 1941-1945 tells the story of Friedl Dicker, a Bauhaus artist and architect whom the Nazis sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, where she secretly continued to teach art until she was sent to Auschwitz and perished.
When I asked Williams, who's basically a one-man shop with a little part-time help, if he can make a living as a small literary publisher, he says, "I think I can... I wouldn't have done it if I didn't think I could really keep the overhead low, be creative, take risks, find books where other people couldn't." At some point, though, "I may be ready for some larger alliances, partnerships. It's kind of lonely," he chuckles. "I need collegiality."