Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

street and of the school yard that everyone else had grown up among mysteries. Because we were always surprising to one another, there was an element of formality in our friendships.
    I still felt some of this surprise, this formality, this mystery, when I was with Saul. He too had a face like an exclamation and a curved nose that the mustache tried to soften. He was small and slight and already balding, as if he had talked his hair off, had raised his eyebrows so many times that his hair had been pushed back once and for all.
    Saul was one of the last of a line of romantic intellectuals. Not satisfied to change the way people thought, he wanted to change the way they felt, the way they were, their desires. He was a reformer at heart, but it was not people’s politics he wanted to influence; it was their sensibilities. He thought such changes could bebrought about by making distinctions. He saw everything as a making of distinctions. He amassed them the way other people amassed money or possessions. He pursued them as some men pursue women. One day, when all the distinctions had been made, we would know what beauty was, and justice.
    While we were close friends, there were many things I didn’t know about Saul. The war still hovered over us; there was a sense of pushing off from it. Yet I had no idea what Saul had done during the war, whether he had been in the service or exempt for some reason. Though I didn’t care one way or the other, it was odd that I didn’t know about those three or four years of his life. He had a job after the war, but I couldn’t have said what he did. I walked him home all the time, yet I had never been in his apartment. When I picked him up there, he was always waiting for me downstairs.
    Occasionally Saul referred in a convoluted, Jamesian way to a female companion, but I never met her, and I sometimes thought that she was only a theory of femininity, a sketch for a character. It was hard to picture Saul with a woman. He never talked about sex, and I wondered whether he made love or distinctions with this shadowy creature.
    When he got sick Saul was working on a review for
The New Leader
. Isaac Rosenfeld, who was the book editor, sometimes gave reviews to friends, or friends of friends, even when they hadn’t published anything before. This was not as frivolous as it sounds, because the Village was full of young men like Saul who could be trusted to turn out a decent piece. Just as Negroes knew about jazz, Jews were expected to know how to write reviews.
    Isaac had given Saul
The Well Wrought Urn
, by Cleanth Brooks, a collection of essays on wide-ranging subjects like romanticism, irony, and great neglected poets, and Saul was rereading all the original texts to refresh his memory. At the rate he was going it would have taken him a year to write the review, a review of one thousand words.
    At first when he got sick Saul thought he had the flu, because it was going around. When the symptoms persisted, he suspected mononucleosis. He was tired all the time and we had to give up our late-afternoon walks, when we would stroll through the Village like a couple of peripatetic philosophers.
    He disappeared for a while. There was no answer when I called him at home—I didn’t have his number at work—and I couldn’t imagine where he was. I thought of his invisible female companion and wondered whether he might, after all, be spending his evenings with her.
    Then he phoned me from his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn. He felt exhausted, he said, and needed someone to look after him. I offered to go and see him, but he put me off. I found out later that he was having tests in the hospital.
    A couple of days after that, he called again and asked me to come to Brooklyn. His illness, he said, was serious.
    Serious? I said. How do you mean, serious?
    He laughed. Then he said, High serious.
    Saul’s mother was a widow, a small, neat woman with a bony face like his and anxious eyes. She had a painful