You may not like them; they may offend you with their insolence, their impatience with mediocrity. I have known persons who disliked Isak Dinesen intensely, and others who were utterly unable to understand and appreciate her. Mind, you do not have to be an aristocrat, or even to desire to live in an aristocracy, to appreciate and understand her. At any rate, it is worth the gamble. If you are made captive, as a steady minority has been, by the tales of Isak Dinesen, you will be in interesting company.
If Seven Gothic Tales pleases you, go on to read Winter’s Tales, a second collection that was published during World War II. Most of these are distinctly inferior to the first seven, but one of them, “Sorrow-acre,” is fully comparable to them, and may in fact be the best of all.
Isak Dinesen died at Rungstedlunch, Denmark, her family home, in 1962. For many years she had been unable to eat much solid food, and she became thinner and thinner as she grew older. When she died she weighed no more than seventy pounds, and those who saw her in the last days had the feeling that she was not dying but simply fading away, passing from this into a better world, the creation of her own vibrant imagination.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
1882–1941
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a noted critic, and the sister of Vanessa Bell. After their father’s death in 1904 the children moved with their mother to Bloomsbury where they formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group, which included many of the most important English authors and artists of the time. Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1915 and together, partly to allay the bouts of ill health that tormented her, they founded the Hogarth Press, which published many of her and their friends’ books.
Virginia Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. It was realistic, as was the next. But she continued to write novels, and Jacob’s Room, 1922, was recognized as a new development in its poetic impressionism. It was praised by T.S. Eliot and attacked by J.M. Murray for its “lack of plot.” It was followed by Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, published, respectively, in 1925, 1927, and 1931. She continued to write novels, stories, critical essays, many letters, and a diary that was published in six volumes after her death. She was a great writer and a hard worker. She was also very unhappy. She probably suffered from bipolar disorder, a type of schizophrenia, which is characterized by intermittent periods of profound depression and high spirits. She was probably aware in 1941 that a period of depression was imminent when she filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the River Ouse, which flowed near her Sussex home, until the water was over her head.
Her death was a shock but not a surprise. For years she had grown more and more distressed by the way the world was going, and especially, perhaps, by the slowness with which the culture of her times was accepting women as writers and artists. She was much more than a mere feminist; she was an earnest student of the history of women in the Western World and a brilliant writer on the subject. Nothing she wrote on it, I think, is more powerful than A Room of One’s Own, a long essay in book form on the subject that was published in 1929. I don’t just recommend it, I urge you to read it, especially Chapter 3, in which Woolf describes what must have been the fate of Shakespeare’s (imaginary) sister who, she supposes, has been born with the same genius as her brother. It would have been impossible for her to write the plays, Woolf argues, for reasons that I think are unassailable.
Unless … Virginia Woolf could not have known about the current research into the life of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke and sister of Sir Philip Sidney. From several points of view her authorship is more credible than that of the Man from Stratford. Even so, it would not undermine Woolf’s brilliant argument. Mary Sidney was an aristocrat, well educated, and highly literate. There was only one of her in her time, and she probably didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays. In any case, you may desire to make up your own mind, but not about the dreadful condition of women in the sixteenth century and for three hundred years after. About that there is no doubt, as Virginia Woolf will make you see.
FRANZ KAFKA
1883–1924
The Trial The Castle
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, the son of a gentle, affectionate, intellectual mother and a domineering, coarse, shopkeeper father who created in the imagination of his son a figure that was at once feared, loathed, and admired. Franz studied law and from this gained much material of use to him in his later career, but he did not complete his studies, going to work instead for an insurance company. He was an excellent worker, neat, careful, scrupulous, dependable, and he could have risen far except for his Jewishness and a certain strangeness familiar to his readers. He had suffered from tuberculosis for years when, in 1922, at the age of thirty-eight, he was forced to retire. He died two years later.
He had been writing for a long time—during his last years, at a feverish rate—but he had published hardly anything. In fact almost no one except his close friend Max Brod knew of the large pile of manuscripts hidden away in Kafka’s closet. On his deathbed Kafka demanded that Brod destroy those manuscripts. We must be grateful to Max Brod for his disobedience, else we would never have heard of Franz Kafka and would not have today The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and two or three dozen more of the more remarkable literary productions of the twentieth century.
The world of Kafka’s novels is a dream world, in which nothing ever happens in an ordinary way. In The Trial, the protagonist, Joseph K., suddenly is informed that he has been charged with a serious crime and that he must prepare his defense. What crime, he asks? This is not made clear to him. When and where will the trial take place? This too is not clear. What must he do to defend himself? This is not clear, either. What are his chances of acquittal? They seem not good, but from time to time his spirits are lifted by unreasonable hopes, which in turn are dashed by some further cruel judicial confusion. And the punishment if he is convicted? This alone is absolutely clear: it will be death.
In The Penal Colony, an earlier work of Kafka’s, punishments were inflicted thus: The convicted man was strapped into a bizarre machine, after which another machine began to write his crime upon his poor, tortured body—with death the final and inescapable result. That is terrible enough; but at least the crime is known. In The Trial it is never known. What am I being charged with? K. cries out in terror and longing. The answer may be, with living; or it may be that there is some other mysterious fault, unknown to K., that has placed him in peril of his life. Or is it that he knows very well what he has done and simply refuses, stubbornly, to admit it? We never find out, for The Trial is unfinished; but in fact such a book could not end, for there is no end to such a nightmare—unless we wake up. And Kafka was unable to awake from his dream …