A BOOKSTORE ON CORNELIA STREET

"Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the Sixties."

Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage

Like many returning veterans, Anatole Broyard was determined to reinvent himself after the war. The son of working class, mixed-race Creoles from New Orleans, he wanted to be a writer. He had learned in the service that he could pass for white and avoid the prejudice, segregation preconceptions suffered by blacks in these days. He had bankrolled some money he had made selling goods on the black market in Tokyo during the occupation. With that money he opened a used bookstore on Cornelia Street in the Village in 1946 and enrolled in the New School.

Anatole Broyard's wife, Aida, a light-skinned Puerto Rican, was right that owning a bookstore in the Village was not a viable plan for earning a living. Luckily for Broyard, as a student he also received a modest stipend under the GI Bill for living expenses. He and Aida divorced soon after he returned home.

The stock in Broyard's Cornelia Street store ran heavily to modernist literature, literary criticism and essays, reflecting his own interests as well as the taste of the Village intelligentsia who were his customers. In his memoir, Kafka Was the Rage, he listed Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, Celine and, of course, Kafka as among his personal favorites. On the recommendation of his friends and customers, he also carried the literary critics Christopher Caudwell, Kenneth Burke, William Empson and F.R. Leavis; translations of European modernists like Paul Valery, Miguel de Unamuno, Italo Svevo and Hermann Broch; the American novelists Nathanael West and Edward Dahlberg; the Bohemian icon Djuna Barnes and British eccentric Baron Corvo. Henry Louis Gates quoted Broyard's friend, rival and customer Richard Gilman, later to become known as a film critic, as saying that Broyard was loathe to part with his books. "Someone would want to buy one and he would snatch it back," according to Gilman.

Selling books was not the real point of the shop. Broyard was inventing himself as an erudite scholar who could more than hold his own in the intellectual chatter of the Village, even though he did not have a college degree. The bookstore was his point of entry into the world of those who wrote for the small literary magazines. That was where he wanted to be. The days of the independent scholar were not yet over in Manhattan. Cheap rents in neighborhoods like the Village meant that writers not permanently employed by a university, research institute or the mass media could survive, if meagerly, supplementing the occasional small check from the literary magazines with somewhat more lucrative part-time gigs and freelance assignments from the mass circulation publications or advertising agencies. Maybe they taught a few classes. In time Broyard would do all of the above.

Broyard’s racial background was not a secret to everyone, particularly in the early Village years. When his family moved from New Orleans, where the mixed race Creoles were a group apart, he felt little in common with the African American community in Brooklyn. His light-skinned parents had at times themselves “passed” to get employment. By listing himself as white when he entered the service, he had escaped the prejudice and segregation imposed on black servicemen. He wanted to be a writer and not a “black writer” limited to writing about race relations and jazz music.

Broyard would achieve his greatest success as a book reviewer and columnist for The New York Times. His children would not learn that they were part black until his death in 1990. In 2007, his daughter, Bliss Broyard, wrote One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets.