Franz Kafka, Occasional Belletrist

Quick, now. I say Franz Kafka, and the first thing you think of is probably ... a cockroach—and one with a funny name like Gregor. But for a little while perish the thought of creepy, if sensitive, crawlers and consider this: that, as today's Writer's Almanac points out in its first installment of love letters to welcome Valentine's Day, Kafka "wrote a great many love letters—many of the anguished, helpless variety—to a Berlin woman [Felice Bauer] to whom he was engaged for five years. Their relationship was carried out almost entirely by letters." (He was engaged to Ms. Bauer twice, and separated from her twice.)

A few of the rosier stretches in his missives are featured in the WA link above. But there are also more familiar Kafka-esque stretches to recall, such as this:

The life that awaits you is not that of the happy couples you see strolling along before you in Westerland ... no lighthearted chatter arm in arm, but a monastic life at the side of a man who is peevish, miserable, silent, discontented, and sickly; a man who, and this will seem to you akin to madness, is chained to invisible literature by invisible chains and screams when approached because, so he claims, someone is touching those chains.

In his mind, too, Felice has become wrapped up in his writing:

Lately I have found to my amazement how intimately you have now become associated with my writing, although until recently I believe that the only time I did not think about you at all was while I was writing.

At the same time Felice was to him the suggestion of a life he might lead beyond work, of a life inching toward something like normalcy—"happy couples" and "their light-hearted chatter" and so on. But as a NYT review of a 1988 reissue of Kafka's love letters, which you can purchase here, remarked,

[Kafka] returned to the solitude he felt so necessary for his work. He apparently believed Yeats's dictum that ''the intellect of man is forced to choose/ Perfection of the life, or of the work'' and in the end, he embraced the latter.

While we are on the subject of letters, make sure to buy a copy of Yours Ever: People and Their Letters, the latest scrumptious book from the pen of journo-turned-novelist Thomas Mallon.

Our Lady of the Peafowl

I haven’t yet made a pilgrimage to Flannery O’Connor’s home Andalusia, but now I’m tempted more than ever to use my frequent flier miles on a plane straight to Savannah. Why? Because the peafowl have returned. Not Flannery’s flock, the last of which died in the late '80s, but three new ones. They even have a posh aviary to keep them safe from predators. Read the whole story here.

O’Connor famously raised her peafowl with swans, chickens, pheasants, quail, turkeys, geese, mallards, and Japanese and Polish bantams at Andalusia starting in 1952. In short, she liked winged things. But, as she wrote in the September 1961 issue of Holiday, she “felt a lack” until bringing peafowl into her fold. She says she has “no short or reasonable answer” for her fascination with them. “My frenzy said: I want so many of them that every time I go out the door I’ll run into one.”

Peafowl turn up in her letters and stories frequently. In one letter she notes a peacock who snatched visitors’ cigarettes and chewed them up. Apparently, it should have lived on a tobacco plantation. And in her story “The Displaced Person,” the priest, looking upon a peacock’s spread tail, utters, “Christ will come like that.” And in “King of the Birds,” she writes:

When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent. … I have never known a strutting peacock to budge a fraction of an inch for a truck or tractor or automobile. It is up to the vehicle to get out of the way.

In fact, O’Connor had a peacock named “Limpy.” It had only one foot, the left, for the right had been lobbed off by a mowing machine.