Free Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

something that had just struck them—the color of the sky, the bend of a street, an incongruity. These notes were postcards to literature that we never mailed.
    I took Milton’s proposal very seriously. I would go upstairs in my parents’ house and listen to jazz for hours, playing records over and over. It suited my mood, which was like the lyrics of a blues song. I had always liked old jazz—from Louis Armstrong to Lester Young—but I hadn’t made up my mind about Charlie Parker, who was everybody’s hero at that time. While he could be brilliant, I found in Parker’s style a hint of the garrulousness that would soon come over black culture.
    Also, it seemed to me that jazz relied too much on improvisation to be a full-fledged art form. Nobody could be that good on the spur of the moment. And there was too much cuteness in jazz. It stammered and strained. It took its sentimentality for wisdom.
    I tried to imagine what Meyer Schapiro would say about jazz. Was it like
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
, a fracturing of music, like the splitting of the atom? But there was something momentous, something world-shaking, about the
Demoiselles
that jazz didn’t have. It seemed to me that jazz was just folk art. It might be terrific folk art, but it was still only local and temporary.
    I found a parallel for jazz not in Schapiro’s class but in Gregory Bateson’s. Bateson loved to tell stories, and he told them very well. He was in New Guinea, he said, living with the Iatmul tribe, sleeping in a thatched hut on tall stilts, when one morning he was awakened at daybreak by a sound of drumming. He got up and looked out and saw a lone man walking beneath the clustered huts of the village, beating a drum. He walked in a curious way, this man, in a sawtooth pattern—not turning around to keep to his pattern but stepping backward, heels first. And in counterpoint to his drumming, he chanted a sad, staccato recitative.
    Bateson learned that this man had suffered a grievance that he could not get settled. The tribe had rejected his plea for redress and so he got up every morning and rehearsed his complaint to the village. He tried to wake them, to disturb their rest, invade their dreams. Thinking about jazz, I remembered this man and I thought that jazz musicians were something like that.
    I was still going to the New School, which seemed to be proof against my mood of disillusionment. My classes met three nights a week and I attended them with a somewhat more dispassionate air than before. It was on one of these nights, after a session with Meyer Schapiro, that I came home to Brooklyn, to find Sheri sitting on my mother’s lap.
    I was so struck by this sight that I felt as if I had butted against a glass door, the way people sometimes do when they don’t see it. Sheri and my mother made such a grotesque picture that I thought for a moment I was back in Schapiro’s class, looking at
Guernica
or a de Kooning.
    They were in an armchair in the family room. Sheri was sitting not
with
my mother in the chair, or besideher, but on her. She was perched on her lap, as a bird perches. In spite of her slenderness, Sheri was much bigger than my mother, who looked like a child beneath her. It was like an adult sitting in a child’s lap. Because of the way Sheri slanted across her, only my mother’s head and shoulders showed; she peered out from behind Sheri. My father was in a love seat across the room.
    They were looking at an album of photographs, our family album. I knew those pictures all too well. I could see them in my mind’s eye, my sisters and myself posed against chimneys and cornices on black tar rooftops. Sometimes, in one corner of the picture, clothes fluttered on a line, because people still hung clothes on the roof to dry in those days. My father took us up there because he thought he needed more light; he tortured us with light. When the pictures came out, we looked helpless and blind, like deer caught in the high beams of a