Kafka by Luis Scafatti

Review

What we learn about Kafka from his uncensored diaries

This article is more than 5 months old

On the centenary of his death, a new English translation of the great writer’s journals reveals some surprising details

Stuart Jeffries

Wednesday 1 May 2024

A

fter his death on 3 June 1924, a letter was found in Franz Kafka’s office in Prague addressed to Max Brod. “Dear Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.”

Diaries by Franz Kafka review – caught in the act

Franz Kafka

Diaries by Franz Kafka review – caught in the act

This article is more than 5 months old

His uncensored journals disclose a messier, more sexual, complex figure – and reveal much about the process of writing

Chris Power

Wednesday 24 April 2024

 

In the late summer of 1917, following the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him within a decade, Franz Kafka went to stay with his sister in the Bohemian countryside. During this unexpectedly calm period in an otherwise perennially besieged life, he wrote a series of aphorisms. One of them runs: “The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.”

Kafka / “Only In This Way Can Writing Be Done”

“Only In This Way Can Writing Be Done” — Franz Kafka

by AINEHI EDORO

October 10, 2012

1912

23 September:  This story, “The Judgement,” I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during the night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strongest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge. At two I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the ante-room for the first time I wrote the last sentence. Turning out the light and the light of day. The slight pains around my heart. The weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night. The trembling entrance into my sisters’ room. Reading aloud. Before that, stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, “I’ve been writing until now.” The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul. Morning in bed. The always clear eyes. Many emotions carried along in the writing–joy, for example–that I shall have something beautiful… — 

Franz Kafka

A Rose Diary by Walt John Pearce

 

THE ROSE BUSH FARTHEST TO THE RIGHT. PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.

A Rose Diary

By Walt John Pearce

 August 28, 2024

April 12, 2024 

I live on a mountain and am surrounded by mountains and last year I planted five rosebushes. Last year I dug five holes and it took a few days because the ground is hard where I live and it is full of bluestone and other rocks. In the old days they made use of the rocks that they found when they were digging into the ground. They built walls of bluestone to keep the cattle from going past the property line and you can still see many of these walls today and there are even some of these walls on my own property. These days the rocks are not useful to me at all and they were a big nuisance to my digging. Once the bushes were in the ground, four out of the five bushes from last year bloomed once or twice, and they had some nice flowers but it was nothing too spectacular. The blooms were small and the flowers were plagued by bugs and beetles and slugs. The beetles were the worst of the pests in the way that they crawled and in the way that they chewed on the petals. The blooms barely smelled like anything at all. The bush all the way to the right never bloomed and its leaves stayed small like fingernails. The lack of frequent blooms made every bloom feel like a gift. Now these bushes are more established and it is their second year. With another year come more established roots and with more established roots come more frequent and beautiful blooms. All of the rose experts and all of the expert rose gardeners agree on this.

 

A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf – review

This collation of Virginia Woolf's thoughts on her writing provides a fascinating insight into her work and the workings of her mind

Anita Sethi

Sunday 30 December 2012

"G

reetings! my dear ghost," Virginia Woolf addresses her older self whom she imagines might one day read the diary entry she is writing. The pages are haunted with such hypothetical selves but also with her fictional characters as they are brought into being, from imagination to printed page. It was her husband Leonard Woolf's aim in publishing A Writer's Diary, he explains in the preface, to distil from his wife's26 volumes of diaries "everything which referred to her own writing", so giving "an unusual psychological picture of artistic production from within". First published in 1953, here reissued with an engaging preface from Lyndall Gordon, it chronicles the period from 1918 to Woolf's final entry four days before her suicide in 1941.

Virginia Woolf / Diary

 

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Diary entry

Virginia Woolf was a lifelong diarist, and her journals reveal deep connections with other modernist writers and their work. In this entry, Woolf hints at lukewarm feelings for James Joyce and records the first time she met T.S. Eliot: “He produced 3 or 4 poems for us to look at—the fruit of two years …. I became more or less conscious of a very intricate & highly organised framework of poetic belief; owing to his caution, & his excessive care in the use of language we did not discover much about it. I think he believes in ‘living phrases’ & their difference from dead ones; in writing with extreme care, in observing all syntax & grammar; & so making this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest.”

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Virginia Woolf

The Diary of Virginia Woolf review – a book for the ages

Woolf’s epic and unmatchable record of her life, times and writing process

Hermione Lee
Thursday 22 June 2023

“Imeant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual,” Virginia Woolf wrote on 17 February 1922, when she had just turned 40. Her diary is full of pain: deaths, losses, illness, grief, depression, anguish, fear. But on every page life breaks in, with astonishing energy, relish and glee. The diary is an unmatchable record of her times, a gallery of vividly observed individuals, an intimate and courageousself-examination, a revelation of a writer’s creative processes, a tender, watchful nature journal, and a meditation on life, love, marriage, friendship, solitude, society, time and mortality. It’s one of the greatest diaries ever written, and it’s excellent to see it back in print.

Iris Murdoch / Before she was a novelist

Iris Murdoch 

Before she was a novelist

‘It’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest and sounding damn silly’ — as Iris Murdoch admits on page 205 of this book.

• Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries
  Peter J. Conradi
  Short Books, pp. 303

A.N. Wilson

13 February 2010

• 
  

‘It’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest and sounding damn silly’ — as Iris Murdoch admits on page 205 of this book.

 

Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith's low point – her Diaries and Notebooks reviewed by Richard Davenport-Hines

BOOKS

BY RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES

November 2021

Patricia Highsmith's journals brim over with the over-emphatic, incomprehensible and rambling ruminations of an old soak. By Richard Davenport-Hines-

Patricia Highsmith was recently described by a leading American literary critic, Terry Castle, as ‘everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope’ and a ‘mind-blitzingly drunk and hellacious bigot’.

She was also the novelist who achieved early acclaim with Strangers on a Train (1950) and later made the murderous sociopath Tom Ripley into the quasi-hero of five novels.

 

Helen Garner: ‘During these hours of peculiar solitude, in conversation
with myself and no one else,I’m free.’ 
Photograph: Darren James

Helen Garner: I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote

Garner has spent thousands of hours on her diary, writing every morning and night. It’s been useful for her other books – and it’s taught her she’s never alone

The 25 best Australian books of 2021

Helen Garner
Wednesday 10 November 2021

When I was young, I liked writing. It was the only thing I was any good at, and I wanted to do it all the time. But I knew I would never be able to write a book.

Patricia Highsmith

The Mystery of Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries

What made her so interested in cold-blooded, apparently motiveless killers?
Benjamin KunkelNovember 8, 2021

A curious habit of euphemism governs our way of talking about that genre of novel which has mainly to do with killing people. Mystery and crime: So libraries and bookstores advertise the relevant section of their shelves. But life abounds with mysteries; very few of them have to do with the true authorship of gruesome murders. Detective fiction supplies another common designation for novels and short stories about homicide, but, again, detectives also have plenty of other crimes to investigate—not to mention that cops and private dicks haven’t been the automatic protagonists of such fiction for 75 years or so. The main character of Dorothy B. Hughes’s great study of misogyny, In a Lonely Place, from 1947, is the self-justifying serial killer himself; and The Expendable Man, a 1963 novel by the same pioneering writer, focuses on a young Black doctor wrongly suspected of tossing the body of a white teenager into a canal.

Self-portrait, 1940
Patricia Highsmith

A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman

The author’s diaries and notebooks chart her early work and love life.

Patricia Highsmith

September 27, 2021

Patricia Highsmith, who published twenty-two novels, including “Deep Water” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” died in 1995, at the age of seventy-four. By the time of her death, she had alienated many of the people in her life, espousing racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise offensive views, but the eight thousand pages of diaries and notebooks she left behind—an edited version of which will be published this November—depict an engaged, social, and optimistic youth. The following selections begin in the spring of 1948, when the twenty-seven-year-old Highsmith had a two-month residency at the Yaddo artists’ colony. There, she met the British writer Marc Brandel, with whom she began an on-again, off-again relationship, and finished writing her first novel, “Strangers on a Train.” To make money, for several years Highsmith wrote for comics, including those published by Timely, which later became Marvel. In December, 1948, she also found seasonal work in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s, where she sold a doll to Mrs. E. R. Senn, the wife of a wealthy businessman from New Jersey, who became the inspiration for the character Carol, in her novel “The Price of Salt,” which was first published, in 1952, under a pseudonym.

Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries Reveal the Complicated Woman Behind The Talented Mr. Ripley

 

Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries Reveal the Complicated Woman Behind The Talented Mr. Ripley

Plus, personal new books from Emily Ratajkowski, Ai Weiwei, Dwyane Wade, and more.

BY KEZIAH WEIR

OCTOBER 28, 2021

“Should like to do a novel,” wrote 20-year-old Patricia Highsmith in 1941. “Something brilliant of course.” Nine years later she’d publish her first, Strangers on a Train, with The Talented Mr. Ripley and nearly two dozen more to follow. Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, out from Liveright and compiled by Highsmith’s longtime editor Anna von Planta, provides stunning access to the mind of a notoriously secretive author. In youth, Highsmith juggled parties and mercurial love affairs (“I almost kissed her when we left but not quite”) with a desire for literary greatness. “Got very good work done,” she wrote at age 22, “even though my hair was flat.” She befriended Truman Capote and Jane and Paul Bowles, lauded her pet snails, and eulogized her cat with a poem.

Patricia Highsmith
by Allela Cornell (1943)

‘Avoid sadists!’: Patricia Highsmith on sex, women and writing Mr Ripley

An extract from the author’s fascinating diaries reveals her innermost thoughts and feelings

Patricia Highsmith

Saturday 13 November 2021

P

atricia Highsmith kept intimate diaries throughout her life, recording her literary success, travels around the world and her many, many love affairs with (usually unavailable) women. Parts of these diaries will soon be published in Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995, compiled by Swiss editor Anna von Planta. The following extracts detail the acclaimed writer’s thoughts on everything from marriage to the meaning of life.

 

Patricia Highsmith, 1987

Diaries and Notebooks by Patricia Highsmith review – sex, booze and cold-blooded murders

These philosophical, sometimes grumpy journals, unearthed after the doyenne of suspense fiction’s death, shine a light on her dual identities, the contempt she felt for other people and her erotic misadventures

Peter Conrad
Sunday 21 November 2021

W

hen Patricia Highsmith looked in the mirror, she saw both a lover and a killer. Early on, the reflected face had a fetching feline allure, but out of sight another facet of Highsmith seemed to belong, she said in 1942, in “a terrible other world of hell and the unknown”. As she aged, what she saw through the “evil distorting lens of my eye” changed: now a gravel-voiced, fire-breathing ogre stared back. Highsmith knew that there are always “two people in each person”, and in 1953 a nightmare confirmed this duality. She dreamed that she was incinerating a naked girl who shivered in a wooden bathtub; the funeral pyre was set with papers, presumably Highsmith’s manuscripts. Waking up, she admitted: “I had two identities: the victim and the murderer.”

 

Patricia Highsmith
Ilustration by T.A.

Bed-hopping, martinis and self-loathing: inside Patricia Highsmith’s unpublished diaries

From her carefree 20s and countless affairs, to literary success and later-life bigotry and rancour, the author’s extraordinary diaries reveal a woman determined to chart her own course

Emma Brockes
Sat 13 Nov 2021 11.00 GMT

In the summer of 1956, Patricia Highsmith was living in upstate New York with Doris Sanders, an advertising copywriter with whom she professed to be in love. The novelist was, at 35, worried about a mid-career slump, although this was more routine anxiety than reality. For the previous seven years, Highsmith had enjoyed a stretch of extraordinary creativity, resulting in the novels that would make her reputation – Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt (published in 1952 under a pseudonym and later republished, under her own name, as Carol), and The Talented Mr Ripley. And, after years of turbulence in her private life, she seemed, finally, to have achieved a measure of tranquillity. She and Doris bought a car. Highsmith started a vegetable garden. Improbably, she joined a church choir.

THE LIFE

AND

LOVES OF

ANNE LISTER

La fascinante vida de Anne Lister, la "primera lesbiana moderna"

By Rebecca Woods

Kneeling side by side under the medieval arches of the tiny church, two women bowed their heads and prayed.

Candles flickering around them, they took the sacrament at the altar.

But this was not a normal church service; in the lovers’ eyes, their “marriage” had been sealed.

It was 1834. Homosexual acts were illegal and sexual relationships between women were largely unacknowledged - the word lesbian had not even been coined.

The life and loves of Shibden Hall's Anne Lister

The intriguing Anne Lister of Shibden Hall

 The life and loves of Shibden Hall's Anne Lister

The fascinating story of a 19th century Halifax woman who dared to flout convention has been told on TV.

Tuesday 25 May 2010

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister was filmed around West Yorkshire.

Anne was a landowner, industrialist, traveller and prolific diarist who shared her life with her female lover at Shibden Hall in Halifax.

Claire Selby at Shibden says: "Anne was a complicated person and really just a fascinating character."

Inheriting the historic hall from her uncle in 1826, Anne Lister lived there until her death in 1840. She left behind diaries containing the most intimate details about her personal life, some of it written in a code which has only been broken in recent years.

Diaries expose ‘strong brew’ of Ripley novelist Patricia Highsmith’s dark thoughts

Patricia Highsmith

Diaries expose ‘strong brew’ of Ripley novelist Patricia Highsmith’s dark thoughts

Controversial views of the late American writer to be revealed by publication of her private notebooks

Edward Helmore in New York
Sat 26 Oct 2019 17.01 BST

It promises to be one of the literary highlights of 2021 – publication of the diaries of Patricia Highsmith, one of the most conflicted, fascinating novelists of the 20th century.

Highsmith, who died in 1995 having written a series of psychological thrillers, including The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train and the romance The Price of Salt, left two sets of diaries hidden in a linen closet in her home in Ticino, Switzerland.