NONFICTION - Oct. 3, 1993

KAFKA WAS THE RAGE: A Greenwich Village Memoir; by Anatole Broyard (Carol Southern Books: $18 ; 160 pp.) “When you look back over your life,” writes Broyard, critic and New York Times editor for two decades, “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.” Wandering into the Village just after World War II, Broyard finds himself in love with Sheri Donatti, self-styled, self-conscious painter/clone of Anais Nin. “Sheri was her own avant-garde. . . . when I came to know her better, I thought of her as a new disease.” And it was a literary life: “If it hadn’t been for books, we’d have been completely at the mercy of sex. Books enabled us to see ourselves as characters . . . and this gave us a bit of control.” Indeed, what is so appealing about this memoir is the fluidity and flexibility of Broyard’s young identity. At one point, deciding to blow what little money he has in the “black market of personality,” Broyard presents himself at the doorstep of Dr. Schachtel, psychoanalyst. “I want to be transfigured, I said. . . . I suppose that like a good analyst he wanted to see my personality grow, while what I needed was for it to be shrunk to a more manageable size. It was much too big for me.” Broyard indulged in classes at the New School, where he studied modern art with Meyer Shapiro (“I slept with modern painting. The life we led depended on modern art. Without that, all we had was a dirty apartment.”), and took classes from Gregory Bateson and Eric Fromm. He lets his guard down only once--in a chapter in which he takes a walk through Prospect Park with his friend Saul Silverman, a man of “high seriousness” who is dying of leukemia. “My mother,” Saul says, “thinks that literature is killing me, that Kafka, Lawrence and Celine have undermined my resistance. She thinks I have brain fever, like Kirilov or Raskolnikov.” Maybe Saul’s mother was right. Maybe they all had brain fever. But through it all, Broyard maintains a humorous distance; surrounded by self-stylers, he plays the fall guy. “It’s a wonderful world,” he writes in an overly full moment, “if you understand it.”