Kafka, Bishop and Literary Pilgrimage: A response to Elana Wolff’s Faithfully Seeking Franz

 

“Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?” — Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”

Sometime in the late 1990s, I was sitting in Trident café in downtown Halifax with the writer and broadcaster Jane Kansas and a young friend of hers, whose name I forget. Jane and I were having a lively conversation about our literary passions — hers: the American writer Harper Lee; mine: Elizabeth Bishop (“3/4ths Nova Scotian and 1/4th New Englander,” or a “herring-choker Bluenoser,” as Bishop described herself to Anne Stevenson). As I remember the conversation, it was animated, with a lot of talk about original sources, such as letters; and also about going to places that were important to these writers. The young friend sat quietly listening to us until at one point she blurted out, in a rather disgusted tone, “You are literary stalkers.” We paused and looked at her. I was surprised by this characterization, but as I thought about it, I couldn’t discount the assessment. I had already made several Bishop pilgrimages (Great Village, Vassar College, Worcester) and was mining her letters and archival documents for information about her life. Jane and I argued that what we were doing wasn’t intrusive, rather an honouring — not an invasion of privacy — but of course on some level it was. Harper Lee (still alive then) was a known recluse. Bishop, long dead, was regarded as a very private person, having once declared to a friend she perferred “closets, closets and more closets.” (OB 327) I have never forgotten that conversation and have endeavoured ever since to conduct my research and writing about Bishop in the most respectful manner. Not sure that made what I did any less objectionable, but I took solace in knowing that Bishop herself was keenly interested in the lives of the writers she read.

 In a 1964 letter to Anne Stevenson, Bishop wrote: “I went to see O Processo — “The Trial” — which is absolutely dreadful. Have you seen it? I haven’t read the book for ages — but in spite of the morbidity of Kafka, etc. I like to remember that when he read his stories out loud to his friends he used to have to stop because he got to laughing so. All the way through the film I kept thinking that any of Buster Keaton’s films give one the sense of tragedy of the human situation, the weirdness of it all, the pathos of man’s trying to do the right thing — all in a twinkling, besides being fun — all the very things poor Orson Welles was trying desperately to illustrate by laying it on with a trowel.” (PPL 864)

While Bishop said she wasn’t a fan of “German art,” its “heaviness,” she had been a reader of Kafka since her adolescence. In a 1949 letter to Robert Lowell, she noted: “I’m glad you like ‘In Prison.’ I had only read The Castle of Kafka when I wrote it, and that long before, so I don’t know where it [her story] came from.” (OA 182) And in a 1958 letter again to Lowell, writing about her response to some “short instrumental pieces” by Webern she had just heard, she noted how much she liked them, “That strange kind of modesty that I think one feels in almost everything contemporary one really likes — Kafka, say, or Marianne [Moore], or even Eliot, and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters … Modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time.” (WIA 250)

As noted above, Bishop was interested in the lives of the artists she admired, so I can’t help but think she would find the new book by Toronto writer Elana Wolff, Faithfully Seeking Franz, intriguing. Just published by Guernica Editions, Wolff’s book is a collection of poems and prose pieces about her search for Kafka in the places that were significant to him. I can certainly appreciate such a compulsion. So when this book came to hand, I was keen to read it. I have enjoyed every page. Each journey, encounter and account conveys not mere “compulsion” but deep, abiding and respectful dedication, devotion even, to understanding the meaning of Kafka’s work, Kafka’s life in his work, Kafka’s impact on posterity, especially on the young woman who read first The Castle and took its impact with her for the rest of her life, following in the footsteps of a compelling mystery: 

Yet having taken steps the author took; steps his ciphers, stand-ins, and characters also took; in seeing and feeling convergences of life and art on location, in company with M., in triangulation with ‘atemporal-aspatial’ Kafka, through signs, signals, messages, indications and ‘visitations’ — through these, the experience of reading has become heightened and deepened, ‘lived into’. Questing has whetted the appetite for more. I’ve become compulsively recursive in my search. I can’t settle. (263) 

As a fellow pilgrim, I could identify with every word of this passage. The identifier in Bishop’s work would be from “Sandpiper”: “poor bird, he is obsessed.” But I prefer to call it passionate, and Elana Wolff’s passion unfolds in the most delightful, insightful, unexpected ways. We follow her footsteps and in so doing, not only learn about Kafka, but also begin to understand what the power of art really is. Connection, coincidence, conundrum: all are experiences along the way; and accompanying it all: questions, surprising revelations, satisfying and disappointing conclusions. Such is life itself. 

In a world filled with chaos and violence and uncertainty, art matters. How so is such a complex and mysterious condition that it cannot be distilled or confined. Wolff never tries to delimit this mystery, even as she charts borders and boundaries (geographical, physiological, aesthetic, existential). One of the many things I admire about Faithfully Seeking Franz is its “Un-endness” (261): 

Invisible and thin and free,

as baffling as Kafka —

whose rendering of difficult things

was easier for him, it seems to me,

than birthing breath.

Will teachers of any persuasion contravene me? (285)