Thursday, October 27

Anatole Broyard

"One night after class I spoke to Dr. Fromm. I asked him to recommend an analyst, hoping he would take me himself. But he didn't; he sent me instead to Ernest Schachtel, who taught a course in Rorschach interpretation at the New School.

"Dr. Schachtel looked like Paul Klee--or at least like a photograph I had seen of him. It pleased me to imagine that I was about to be analyzed by Paul Klee. Schachtel was thin, well-dressed, delicate-looking, almost nervous. He impressed me as the sort of man who read Schiller, Heine, and Kleist, who listened to Schubert and Mahler. His expression was melancholy and I supposed he had suffered during the war. What was it like, I wondered, to leave your own country for another, where all you met was the unhappiness and confusion of the people who lived there? Suppose when Americans went to Paris or Florence, the waiters, hotel clerks, and taxi drivers told them their dreams, their fears and nameless angers.

"In Dr. Schachtel's apartment on the Upper West Side, there was just a touch of Bauhaus. His furniture was light, almost fragile, and it occurred to me that when Germans weren't heavy they were often fragile. Like Fromm and Horney, he was a revisionist, and that was what I wanted, to be revised. I saw myself as a first draft."

--Anatole Broyard
fr. Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir
[New York: Random House, 1993]

Sunday, October 16

Paragraphs from Stein, 15

"It is a puzzle why are german dogs all rather timid gentle friendly and obedient, they are that, the characteristic german dogs, it kind of cheers one up that some time they the people will be that because people and dogs must be alike in a country in which they are born and bred and have descended. There are the poodles, the dachshunds, even the dog which is a kind of bull, the Bismark dog is gentle and the german black police-dog is a much gentler animal than the Alsatian wolf hound, it is a funny thing this, being fond of poodles, and always having them I bother about all this. I thought poodles were french but the french breed always has to be refreshed by the german one, and the german pincher is so much more gentle than our Chichuachua little dog which it resembles, and so everything would be a puzzle if it were not certain that logic is right, and is stronger than the will of man. We will see."

fr. Paris France  
[New York: Liveright, 1970--first publ. in 1940]