12/10/2014
Which Writer’s Letters Are Most Worth Reading? - NYTimes.com
http://nyti.ms/11OTXTU
SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
Which Writer’s Letters Are Most Worth Reading?
DEC. 2, 2014
Bookends
By DANA STEVENS and FRANCINE PROSE
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of
books. This week, Dana Stevens and Francine Prose discuss what they
consider the most worthwhile literary letters.
By Dana Stevens
Whoever the letters’ intended addressee may have been, it’s the poet
Emily Dickinson who’s the true Master.
There’s something both sacred and profane about reading the love letters
of a favorite writer. In the intimate realm of amorous correspondence — letters
not crafted for posterity but dashed off in the heat of passion or the anguish of
longing — the reader sees an author at his or her most rhetorically naked,
pushed up against the limits of the same language he or she usually deploys
with such mastery. A great literary love letter feels like something no one but
the intended recipient should be reading, yet it often shows the writer’s talents
at the height of their power. And to the degree a reader believes that an
author’s life and writing should be kept separate, the love letter serves as a
puzzling test case: Is it a biographical artifact or a crafted literary work?
It’s hard to think of a cache of love letters more tightly bound up with the
poetic process of their author than the three enigmatic “Master letters” of
Emily Dickinson, written between 1858 or so and 1862 to an unknown
addressee whose much-debated identity is a perennial literary detective story
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and parlor game. Two of the most likely candidates,if only for a lack of
disqualifying evidence, appear to be the Rev. Charles Wadsworth and the
newspaper editor Samuel Bowles, both married men who befriended the
Dickinson family close to the time the letters were written. This was also the
period of Dickinson’s great creative flowering, when she first began creating
the hand-sewn books, known as “fascicles,” in which her sister Lavinia would
discover many of the nearly 1,800 poems left after her death. Since the
manuscripts of the letters that remain are much-crossed-out first drafts,
there’s no way of knowing whether fair copies were ever sent — meaning that
whoever the real Master was, posterity may have intercepted his love letter.
Contemporary scholarship on Dickinson (notably Susan Howe’s
remarkable book “My Emily Dickinson”) has tended to downplay the hoary
biographical debate about the true identity of the Master, focusing instead on
the glittering strangeness of the letters themselves. The speaker — who refers
to herself in the third person as “Daisy,” a pet name Dickinson appears to have
bestowed on herself only here — veers wildly from the depths of romantic
abjection to the heights of grandiose sovereignty, interrupting herself every
few words with those same omnipresent dashes that populate her poetry. In
the third and weirdest of the letters, her syntax breaks down almost
completely in an outpouring of disjointed, elliptical phrases that could each be
the beginning of a different (and great) Emily Dickinson poem: “I used to
think when I died — I could see you — so I died as fast as I could — “; “What
would you do with me if I came ‘in white’? Have you the little chest to put the
Alive — in?”
For me, the Master letters’ enduring fascination comes from the site they
occupy at the convergence of private document and poetic first draft. They
offer a thrilling glimpse into the mind of the writer around age 30, when she
was just beginning to harness the force of her own genius — and for all her
ostentatious humility and at times sentimental cajolery, “Daisy” is well aware
of the power her pen is beginning to wield, even if the only one reading the
letter is her. Writing on the third Master letter, Howe astutely notes
Dickinson’s “brilliant masking and unveiling, her joy in the drama of
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pleading.” Whoever their intended addressee may have been, it’s the poet
Emily Dickinson who’s the true Master. But at the same time, these strange
missives are unmistakably the work of a flesh-and-blood woman undone by
longing — and not a longing for Jesus or the abstract notion of redemption, as
some interpretations would have it, but love for an unattainable flesh-andblood man. You don’t generally invite an abstract notion up to Amherst for a
summer visit, or ask after his health or beg him to take you “where Sundown
cannot find us — and the true keep coming — till the town is full.” Then again,
with Emily Dickinson, you never know.
Dana Stevens is the film critic at Slate and a co­host of the Slate
Culture Gabfest podcast. She has also written for The Atlantic and
Bookforum, among other publications.
◆◆◆
By Francine Prose
Kafka’s letters to Felice provide an exhaustive and intimate account of
one of the more twisted love affairs in literary history.
Somewhere among my papers is an advertisement I received more than
25 years ago. The envelope, which arrived in the mail, contained a prospectus
from a subscription service offering me a chance to get Kafka’s letters to Felice
mailed to me, in care of Felice, or maybe the letters would be addressed to
Felice, in care of me.
The correspondence between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer — to whom he
was twice engaged, an engagement twice broken off — began in September
1912, shortly after they met at the Prague apartment of Kafka’s friend Max
Brod. A distant relation of Brod’s by marriage, Felice lived in Berlin, where she
worked as a secretary. After Felice had admired some snapshots of Kafka’s
recent vacation, the conversation turned to Palestine, and by the end of the
evening Kafka and Felice had shaken hands on the promise that they would
travel there together — the following year! That journey never occurred; it was
never going to occur. The letters — more than 500 of them in the volume that
appeared after Felice sold the letters to Schocken in 1955, three decades after
Kafka’s death — were what happened instead of the voyage to Palestine.
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The point of the subscription service was that I would get the letters
(Kafka’s letters, Felice’s having been lost) in the order and at the frequency
that Felice received them from Kafka. Among the plan’s selling points was its
designer’s knowledge of the postal system in Prague and Berlin in the early
20th century. At that time it was often possible to get mail more than once a
day, so if Felice got two letters on a certain day, I would get two letters; if she
got none, I would get none. If she got a postcard, I would get a postcard.
I didn’t subscribe, and now I’m sorry — sort of. Because now, as then, I
wonder: Why would anyone want that?
If the service had worked as promised, would its subscribers have come to
share Felice’s worries and doubts, her anxieties about the mail: Will Franz
write to me today? Will he punish me with silence? Will he besiege me with
prying questions about the most personal aspects of daily life, insistent
requests to tell him everything I’ve eaten all week? And what bizarre mood will
he be in? Will he accuse me bitterly of not understanding his work? Will he
complain about his physical health, his mental suffering, the myriad ways in
which his compulsion to write will forever prevent him from leading a normal
life: marriage, children, Sunday lunches, domestic happiness?
Would I have been tempted to cancel my subscription after receiving the
second letter, dated Sept. 28, 1912, in which Kafka wrote: “Oh, the moods I get
into, Fräulein Bauer! A hail of nervousness pours down upon me continuously.
What I want one minute I don’t want the next. When I have reached the top of
the stairs, I still don’t know the state I shall be in when I enter the apartment.”
And would my decision have been affected by the knowledge that between
writing the first letter and the second, Kafka sat down and composed, in a
single night, one of his masterpieces, “The Judgment”?
Kafka’s letters to Felice provide an exhaustive and intimate account of one
of the more twisted love affairs in literary history. They tell us as much as any
biography about Kafka’s struggles, his character, his relations with his family,
his hopes and fears for his work.
For readers who have always secretly wanted to conduct an intense and
hopeless romance with one of the world’s greatest writers — and world-class
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neurotics — let me recommend these letters. You can experience the highs and
lows of such an affair without having to fend off the inappropriate questions,
or make dates that your fiancé will fail to keep, or experience the stress and
hurt feelings that Felice Bauer must have suffered — as it turned out, on our
behalf.
Francine Prose is the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction,
among them the novel “Blue Angel,” a National Book Award nominee, and
the guide “Reading Like a Writer,” a New York Times best seller. Her new
novel is “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” Currently a
distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, she is the recipient of numerous
grants and awards; a contributing editor at Harper’s, Saveur and Bomb; a
former president of the PEN American Center; and a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences.
A version of this article appears in print on December 7, 2014, on page BR87 of the Sunday Book
Review with the headline: Which writer’s letters are most worth reading?.
© 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/which-writers-letters-are-most-worth-reading.html?ref=review&_r=0
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