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The afterlife of the author
It is important, when reading Kafka, not to read him too Brodly.
A neat turn by Adam Thirlwell, from “The Last Flippant Writer” (1999), quoted by Zadie Smith in the latest New York Review of Books. The joke is that Kafka, it is theorized, suffers from the effect of his executor, the gnomically named Max Brod, who arranged much of his work posthumously and possibly with a religio-mystical bent. There are many parallel examples, and on some occasions it seems to have even occurred sometimes multiple times (Nietzsche comes to mind). Smith quotes from Thirlwell several times but her article is an occasion to meander around Louis Begley’s The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay. Typical of the New York Review, it is divided into sections without any apparent purpose or determinant structure; and Smith, also typically, seems interested in only those aspects of Kafka’s personal identity that hinge on race or gender issues: the conflicted Jewishness, the misogyny. The constant assumption is that these are instructive in a kind of instinctive way about the literature: and about the relevance of all these claims, Brod aside, there does not even seem to be a pause for doubt.
William Logan makes a similar case in his review of Frank O’Hara, but with greater fluency and more crafty conflation of the writer and his body of work, which he says “gives us as much of a life as poetry can”. This sounds suspiciously like a half-hearted buy-off appearing, as it does, at the end of a review spent mostly condescending to the work, or setting up signposts to the critic’s range with nonsensical metaphors (we get both “Wallace Stevens at the soda fountain” and “Ezra Pound on happy pills”). He yearns to be Randall Jarrell but lacks any of the intuition. The faint praise is unrelenting, and most of it is bound by the critic’s approach to the poet’s life, rather than the actual material of the poems: their words appear in unbroken blocks and their specific operation goes entirely unmentioned. Instead,
Whitman’s search for the democracy of the American demotic — what he called slang — had a century later become the hilarious musings of a vain young man about town (O’Hara wrote about homosexual life with a cheerful nonchalance rarely matched since; Allen Ginsberg by contrast was slightly lugubrious about sex). It’s hard to know whether Whitman, who took poetry seriously, would have laughed or wept.
At the start of last year, Logan authored a loathsome review of the Modern Library’s Hart Crane collection, in which he had time for the poet’s “voracious sexual appetites” and his bad spelling but not enough for more than a dozen or so lines of verse.
It may be more than a difference of degree between these two articles: Smith’s, convoluted but not ultimately upsetting; Logan’s, more direct but verging on poisonous. But each eventually amounts to “a way of avoiding literature”.