Instead of actually studying, I spent a lot of time in college finding and reading the most obscure books in my college library. I spent a blissful afternoon passed out over Franz Kafka's epic Diaries, as well as several disturbed hours with the letters of James Joyce. (Joyce, infamously, appears on a list of "6 Geniuses You Didn't Know Were Perverts", a shaky premise for a list only because, from what I've observed, almost all geniuses appear to have been perverts.)
I love the letters and diaries of famous writers. While reviewing a biography based on Kafka's love letters for Bookslut, I read his letters again, and remembered the fantasy of love that these letters created and then inhabited. Kafka's love letters (maybe sadly?) have almost no connection to the relationships he was actually in. Of the four women he wrote to most passionately, Kafka was engaged to three, in love with one, happy with another, and married to none.
Elaborate romantic fantasies can indicate narcissism (or perhaps just introversion), but they are still beautiful to read. Novels have been blamed, at least for the past few centuries, for giving women unrealistic notions about love (consider the case of Emma Bovary). If this is true, it's hard to know whom to blame. Towards the end of the film "Becoming Jane", Jane Austen - who remained single for life - tells her sister, "My heroines will have transcendent marriages." It's easy to judge novels for their ill effects, but harder to blame the writers, for whom writing was a means of denial and an avenue of escape.
Letters live in that awkward liminal territory between reality and imagination. The act of writing, for a writer, can never be divorced from its transformative powers, but a letter - especially something so intimate as a love letter, with its single intended recipient - can never be a novel, either. It reveals unique things about an author's character and voice. For someone familiar with that writers' fiction, it's like meeting an old friend in a new context.
Kafka was sick, poor and unhappy for most of his years on earth. Needless to say, his literary self acknowledged none of these realities. He wasn't the only writer to use letters in an attempt to persuade, although he may have been unusual in using them to persuade himself. William Faulkner wrote to the much-younger Joan Williams for years, but his main intention was to get her to see him as something other than a friend and adviser.
Maybe I like famous writers' letters for the same reason other people like photos of celebrities buying groceries: a glimpse into the portion of life we weren't meant to see. Of course, put that way, it sounds kind of greedy and creepy.
I love the letters and diaries of famous writers. While reviewing a biography based on Kafka's love letters for Bookslut, I read his letters again, and remembered the fantasy of love that these letters created and then inhabited. Kafka's love letters (maybe sadly?) have almost no connection to the relationships he was actually in. Of the four women he wrote to most passionately, Kafka was engaged to three, in love with one, happy with another, and married to none.
Elaborate romantic fantasies can indicate narcissism (or perhaps just introversion), but they are still beautiful to read. Novels have been blamed, at least for the past few centuries, for giving women unrealistic notions about love (consider the case of Emma Bovary). If this is true, it's hard to know whom to blame. Towards the end of the film "Becoming Jane", Jane Austen - who remained single for life - tells her sister, "My heroines will have transcendent marriages." It's easy to judge novels for their ill effects, but harder to blame the writers, for whom writing was a means of denial and an avenue of escape.
Letters live in that awkward liminal territory between reality and imagination. The act of writing, for a writer, can never be divorced from its transformative powers, but a letter - especially something so intimate as a love letter, with its single intended recipient - can never be a novel, either. It reveals unique things about an author's character and voice. For someone familiar with that writers' fiction, it's like meeting an old friend in a new context.
Kafka was sick, poor and unhappy for most of his years on earth. Needless to say, his literary self acknowledged none of these realities. He wasn't the only writer to use letters in an attempt to persuade, although he may have been unusual in using them to persuade himself. William Faulkner wrote to the much-younger Joan Williams for years, but his main intention was to get her to see him as something other than a friend and adviser.
Maybe I like famous writers' letters for the same reason other people like photos of celebrities buying groceries: a glimpse into the portion of life we weren't meant to see. Of course, put that way, it sounds kind of greedy and creepy.
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