You set particular by the use of irony in bringing me up, it was also especially fitting given your superiority over me. You usually reprimanded me like this: “Can’t you do it this way instead? Isn’t that a bit too much for you? Surely you don’t have time for that?” or similar. And all of these questions were accompanied by a spiteful laugh or a spiteful face. You punished me sometimes even before I had done wrong. When you particularly wanted to antagonize me you would refer to me in the third person, as if I was not even worthy of an angry address; you would say ostensibly to Mother, but actually to me as I sat there too, something like: “We simply can’t have that kind of behavior from our son” (This produced a counter habit in me: I never dared, or later never even thought, out of sheer habit, to address you directly while mother was present. It was far less dangerous for me to put questions to Mother as long as she sat beside you, so I would ask Mother: “How is Father?”, thus protecting myself from any surprises). Of course, there were times when I agreed with your extreme irony, notably when its target was someone else, Elli for example, with whom I had been on bad terms for years. For me it was an orgy of malice and Schadenfreude when you referred to her like this at almost every meal: “Look at the fat cow, she has to sit ten meters from the table,” and again when you imitated her, in spiteful and exaggerated fashion as you sat in your chair, without the faintest hint of warmth or humor, but rather with bitter enmity, as if trying to show how terribly she offended your sensibilities. How often scenes like this must have occurred, and how little they actually achieved. This, I think, was because the extent of your anger and spite was so disproportionate to the matter at hand, we felt that your anger could not have been caused by such a trivial thing as sitting so far from the table, rather it must have been latent from the beginning, triggered in this case purely by chance. Since we were convinced that it would eventually be triggered anyway, we did not really let it trouble us, we were also desensitized by your constant threats; little by little we gradually became aware that there was no danger of a real thrashing. We became surly, unobservant, disobedient children, constantly preoccupied with escape, mostly internal escape. And so you suffered, and we suffered. In your opinion you were doing no wrong when you stood there with clenched teeth and that gurgling laugh which had given me my first idea of hell as a child, and said bitterly (as you did recently on receiving a letter from Constantinople): “What a rabble!”
—Franz Kafka, Brief an den Vater (Dearest Father), 1919 (translation Hannah and Richard Stokes)
To the Film Industry in Crisis
by Frank O’Hara
Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it’s you I love!
In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
And give credit where it’s due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me
how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed
herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church
which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment,
not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you,
glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,
stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all
your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To
Richard Barthelmess as the “tol’able” boy barefoot and in pants,
Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,
Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers’ gasping spouses,
the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer
Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled,
her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon,
its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer,
Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea’s yacht,
and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney
from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx,
Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,
Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,
Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio
eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining,
and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining
and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell
in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you
and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras
who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines,
my love!
Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays
and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you
as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces
in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night
but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!
Elli for example, with whom I had been on bad terms for years. For me it was an orgy of malice and Schadenfreude when you referred to her like this at almost every meal: “Look at the fat cow, she has to sit ten meters from the table,” and again when you imitated her, in spiteful and exaggerated fashion as you sat in your chair, without the faintest hint of warmth or humor, but rather with bitter enmity, as if trying to show how terribly she offended your sensibilities.
Sometimes, reading Kafka’s letters and diaries, I wish I had the ability to transport him to a world in which he could absent himself from his aloneness and family dysfunction by reading his own work with all their paradoxical consolations, as in this zettel from his “Zurau Aphorisms”:
“If you were walking across a plain, felt every desire to walk, and yet found yourself going backward, it would be a cause for despair; but as you are in fact scaling a steep precipice, as sheer in front of you as you are from the ground, then your backward movement can be caused only by the terrain, and you would be wrong to despair.”
Once you’ve read all of his stuff you can get your hands on, do not miss the illustrated Kafka biography by David Mairowitz and Robert Crumb.