Anatole Broyard

Anatole Paul Broyard was born on July 16, 1920, in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Black Louisiana Creole family, the son of Paul Anatole Broyard, a carpenter and construction worker, and his wife, Edna Miller, neither of whom had finished elementary school. Broyard was descended from ancestors who were established as free people of color before the Civil War. Documents in the Louisiana state archives show all of Broyard's ancestors, on both sides, to have been Black, at least since the late eighteenth century,[1] while the first Broyard recorded in Louisiana was a French colonist in the mid-eighteenth century.[2][3] Broyard was the second of three children; he and his sister Lorraine, two years older, were light-skinned with European features. Their younger sister, Shirley, who eventually married Franklin Williams, an attorney and civil rights leader, had darker skin and African features.[4]

When Broyard was a child during the Depression, his family moved from New Orleans to New York City, as part of the Great Migration[5] of African Americans to the northern industrial cities. According to his daughter, Bliss Broyard, "My mother said that when my father was growing up in Brooklyn, where his family had moved when he was six, he'd been ostracized by both white and black kids alike. The black kids picked on him because he looked white, and the white kids rejected him because they knew his family was black. He'd come home from school with his jacket torn, and his parents wouldn't ask what happened. My mother said that he didn't tell us about his racial background because he wanted to spare his own children from going through what he did."[6]

The Broyard family lived in a working-class and racially diverse community in Brooklyn. He saw his parents "pass" as white to get work, as his father found the carpenters union to be racially discriminatory.[4] By high school, the younger Broyard had become interested in artistic and cultural life.[4]

Broyard had some stories accepted for publication in the 1940s. He began studying at Brooklyn College before the U.S. entered World War II. When he enlisted in the Army, the armed services were segregated and no African Americans were officers. He was accepted as white at enlistment and he successfully completed officers school. During his service, Broyard was promoted to the rank of captain.[5]

After the war, Broyard maintained his white identity.[7] He used the GI Bill to study at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.[3]

Broyard settled in Greenwich Village, where he became part of its bohemian artistic and literary life. With money saved during the war, Broyard owned a bookstore for a time. As he recounted in a 1979 column:

Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel... Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity.[8]

Broyard did not identify with or champion black political causes. Because of his artistic ambition, he tended not to acknowledge that he was black.[9] Charlie Parker once said of Broyard, “He’s one of us, but he doesn’t want to admit he’s one of us.”[1] On the other hand, Margaret Harrell has written that she and other acquaintances were casually told that he was a writer and black before meeting him, and not in the sense of having to keep it secret. That he was black was well known in the Greenwich Village literary and art community from the early 1960s.[9]

As writer and editor Brent Staples wrote in 2003, "Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer – and not just a 'Negro writer' consigned to the back of the literary bus."[7] The historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote: "In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy."[8]

During the 1940s to early 1960s, Broyard published stories in Modern Writing, Discovery, and New World Writing, three leading pocket-book format "little magazines". He also contributed articles and essays to Partisan Review, Commentary, Neurotica, and New Directions Publishing. Stories of his were included in two anthologies of fiction widely associated with the Beat writers, but Broyard did not identify with them.[5]

Broyard often was said to be working on a novel, but never published one. After the 1950s, Broyard taught creative writing at The New School, New York University, and Columbia University, in addition to his regular book reviewing. For nearly fifteen years, Broyard wrote daily book reviews for The New York Times. The editor John Leonard was quoted as saying, "A good book review is an act of seduction, and when he [Broyard] did it there was no one better."[4]

In the late 1970s, Broyard started publishing brief personal essays in the Times, which many people considered among his best work.[4] These were collected in Men, Women and Anti-Climaxes, published in 1980. In 1984 Broyard was given a column in the Book Review, for which he also worked as an editor. He was among those considered "gatekeepers" in the New York literary world, whose positive opinions were critical to a writer's success.[5]

Broyard first married Aida Sanchez, a Puerto Rican woman, and they had a daughter, Gala. They divorced after Broyard returned from military service in World War II.[4]

In 1961, at the age of 40, Broyard married again, to Alexandra (Sandy) Nelson, a modern dancer and younger woman of Norwegian-American ancestry. They had two children: son Todd, born in 1964, and daughter Bliss, born in 1966. The Broyards raised their children as white in suburban Connecticut. The social critic Ernest Van den Haag, a close friend of Broyard's, said, “I do think it’s not without significance that Anatole married a blonde, and about as white as you can get. He may have feared a little bit that the children might turn out black. He must have been pleased that they didn’t.”[1] When they had grown to young adults, Sandy urged Broyard to tell them about his family (and theirs), but he refused.[5]

Shortly before he died, Broyard stated that he missed his friend Milton Klonsky, with whom he used to talk every day, after Klonsky's death. Broyard said that after Milton died, "no one talked to me as an equal".[9][5]

Broyard's first wife and child were not mentioned in his The New York Times obituary.[3] Sandy told their children of their father's ancestry before his death.[3]

Broyard died of prostate cancer on October 11, 1990, at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.[3]

• 1974, Aroused By Books, collected reviews, published by Random House
• 1980, Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes, collected essays, published by Methuen
• 1992, Intoxicated by My Illness: and Other Writings on Life and Death
• 1993, Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir